


Palimpsest

by Paian



Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1
Genre: 30000-50000 words, Action/Adventure, Alien Planet, Alien Technology, Alternate Universe, Angst, Apocalypse, Dark, Disturbing, Episode Related, Episode Tag, Episode: s02e02 In the Line of Duty, Episode: s03e11 Past and Present, Episode: s04e10 Beneath the Surface, Episode: s04e17 Absolute Power, Episode: s05e02 Threshold, Episode: s07e06 Lifeboat, Episode: s09e12 Collateral Damage, Episode: s10e10 The Quest (1), F/F, F/M, Female Friendship, Future Fic, Gen, Heroism, Identity Issues, Introspection, M/M, Male Friendship, Memories, Non-Linear Narrative, Other, Outer Space, POV Alternating, POV Female Character, POV Male Character, Present Tense, Quest, Science Fiction, Season/Series 10, Space Opera, Spaceships, Team, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-01-09
Updated: 2007-01-09
Packaged: 2017-10-03 04:27:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paian/pseuds/Paian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A tale told in reverse, so that the story is driven not by 'What happens next?' but by 'What happened before that caused <em>this</em> to happen?'</p><p>Darkfic, teamfic, futurefic, very long (now AU) episode tag for 'The Quest Part 1.'</p><p>Sexual innuendo and situations. No non-con, no explicit torture, no explicit sex.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Palimpsest

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Minxy in the Dark Gate Ficathon.

>   
> 
> 
> How did we get to be here?  
>  What was the moment?  
>         --_Merrily We Roll Along_  
> 

On a slow boat to forever, Jack replies, "Nah, no apologies." He coughs; it's not a good sound. "I kinda like who you turned out to be. With the" -- a really hacking cough, as if he's inhaled razor blades -- "serial numbers ... filed off ... and all."

Daniel smiles for him, and pulls the covers up more snugly when the frail, aged frame shudders, and says, "Beats the crap out of the alternative."

"Yeah," Jack says -- and it's a huff of laughter, and then it's a blood-spraying cough, and then it's a death rattle.

Daniel doesn't slide the eyelids down right away. Time on this ship flows like winter sap, and he wants to make sure Jack's gotten a good look at wherever he's going.

Also, his arms aren't working too well. The arthritis is bad, and there's been some muscle atrophy, and there were neurological complications all along that they couldn't begin to diagnose.

Biologically, he must be well over a hundred by now. The first ten years were a little bumpy, but it's been a good ride, the last seventy or so.

He moves slowly, stiffly to the control panel for the hypospace drive. The energy banks are nearly depleted -- at full charge they weren't rated for even a century, so really, that's good -- but there's enough power to trigger a cascade reaction through the naquadria core.

As he arms the self-destruct, he feels the weirdest little frisson, almost like a kind of deja vu. He shakes it off, toggles the countdown sequence on, and with the last of his failing strength pushes the pilot's stick all the way forward.

The ship noses down, a slow plunge through fathomless netherspace into the sluggish deeps of the universe, where the explosion's fire will blaze for an eternity.

&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;∞

"For dying again," Jack says at last, one evening when they're sitting by the fire. He's built it up too high for the primitive fireplace, but it's a cold season on a cold planet, and wood's the one fuel they have plenty of. He won't let it burn the house down. Not 'til they have to bug out, anyway.

"Ah," Daniel says.

"And for not being dead," Jack says.

"Because it's not fair," Daniel says, working it through. "Because of the others." Then, like casting a line into dark waters, "All the others."

Daniel's always been a good guesser. Good at puzzles, a genius with cryptography; in his own way, as good as Carter at taking things apart and figuring out what they do and how. He can determine which is the crucial piece, the part that can still work, and salvage it from a faltering argument or a failed negotiation the way Carter would from a malfunctioning device.

Jack has never given him any of the pieces to this puzzle, but he's under no illusion that he can protect or prevent Daniel from picking them up on his own. He doesn't know how much Daniel knows, and he doesn't want to. He's not the trout in the river Daniel's fishing.

"You could kill me," Daniel says, almost offhandedly, gaze on his book, face blanched by the light of its screen even on minimum power.

Jack responds to the surface statement instead of the implication underneath. "In more ways than we could count between us."

"You can kill me," Daniel says, correcting his phrasing. He looks up. "If it will make it right."

_It would barely be a start_, Jack thinks, staring into the fire that can't warm this chill from his soul. _And it wouldn't make any difference. Not even to the people who think it would._

"Will it make it right, Jack?" Daniel says in the same mild, casual tone.

Jack doesn't turn to him, doesn't answer for a long time. He could say, "It wasn't you," and it would be doubly true. But that wasn't the question.

"No," Jack says.

They don't talk anymore after that. Daniel reads his book, curious about everything, interested in everything, hungry to fill his insatiable mind; it's an ongoing effort for Jack to keep the books coming and charge the power sources to play them. Jack stares into the depths of the fire, resting his body after a long labor-filled day, playing memories across the screen of his mind's eye.

He misses people. Particular people, and people in general. He misses being around people who've been to the places he's been, who know people he knew, who served in theaters where he served. He's tired of being a security guard, he's tired of hiding, he's tired of killing. They're running out of places to run, and if he doesn't come up with something soon, old age isn't the only thing of the past that's going to catch up with them.

But he made his choice a long time ago, and there is nothing he won't do to keep Daniel safe.

He misses Daniel most of all.

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Jack looks up from the blood-spattered note, the handwriting more familiar than his own.

"I forgive you," he says, and slips the note deep into an inner pocket of the insulating jacket under his impermex shell. The left inner pocket, over his heart. He's not sentimental, just right-handed.

"For what?"

_For whatever the guy who wrote this wanted forgiveness for. You'd have to ask him._ "I don't know yet," Jack says, pulling gear out of his pack. "If I figure it out someday, I'll let you know." He bundles his acquisition into coat and gloves and goggles, stuffs the bare feet into thermal boots, wraps a muffler around the head and face; they're headed for an arctic climate, and that body never handled the cold well. He Saran Wraps the bundle, and they're good to go.

"OK ... " Daniel's voice comes out muted by the layers of scarf. Not doubtful, exactly, or questioning; more like cautious. Curious, but waiting for observation and deduction to refine and target his questions. His eyes, behind the goggles, look larger than they are, bluer than they could possibly be; Jack always forgets how blue they are. There's no recognition in them, but they're far from blank. They're as penetrating as they ever were, and the big round lenses make them look ... well, like Daniel's eyes. Which hurts like bloody fucking hell for a second.

Jack shakes it off. "On short time here," he says. "Let's move out."

"We've done this before?" Daniel says -- the question that was forming behind those lenses while he stared hard into this guy he's never met who's trying to whisk him away from the only place he's ever known. Yeah, they've done this before.

"Vis Uban ring any bells?" Jack says. "No?" It's a stupid thing to say, pointless and a little cruel. This young man -- they're the same physiological age now, Jack took the treatment for the first and last time a week ago -- will never remember Vis Uban, or any other planet where Daniel ever lived. But Jack's come a long way, and he's weary to his core, and he knows that Daniel won't leave until he's gotten an answer that satisfies him -- whatever the hell the criteria could be for what constitutes an answer when your whole life's the question.

"No," Daniel says, but he takes a step forward, as if to follow where Jack hasn't even led yet -- an offer to go with him, even though Jack hasn't started to go.

Jack doesn't know if Daniel knows what's out there. Jack doesn't know if Daniel's ever been outside the underground bunker. Jack doesn't know if Daniel knows there's a gate a hundred meters away, or if he even knows what a stargate is. But he's found him, and before the tribunal goons who were trying to find him first, and before the agency assassins who would have found him before the goons could haul him in for execution.

He's found him, and if there's going to be any starting-over, that's where the starting-over had to start.

Beats the crap out of the alternative.

&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;

A hot wind keens across the wasteland of this abandoned continent on an abandoned world, moans in the oxidizing frames of abandoned buildings in the abandoned town ahead, plays the stargate behind Jack like a giant flute. In his hooded impermex suit, he feels like some Saran Wrapped leftover pulled from his own fridge, but the clear material is impervious to everything except visible light, and it'll keep the radiation at bay.

The buildings wouldn't afford any protection even if they hadn't rotted half away, but he knows that the lead-laced soil and bedrock do, and he knows what's under the surface. More or less, anyway. He just doesn't know how much lead -- or C4, or zat juice, or blood -- it's going to cost him to gain access. His intel was sound, but his connections are iffy; black ops was two lifetimes ago, and all the people who could have vouched for him with people like this are dead. He used his old general's stars to carve his way this far, and it left a trail a blind cripple could follow. He has to get in fast and get out faster and disappear with his payload even faster than that. He's got plenty of boltholes. It all comes down to how the next ten minutes play out.

Their scanners can't penetrate the impermex, but he's slung enough weapons outside the suit to make his point, and they can see his face to recognize it. Mercs slip out of the ironwork to point the way, open doors for him, guide him to the pocked-floor room where the payload is being shoved up through a trapdoor. They'll seal it after he leaves, probably bring the building down around it, never use either again. There's an aftercare stipulation in the kinds of contracts these places offer, but this is one client they're obviously -- and wisely -- eager to be rid of. There are bigger risks than the risk to their reputation.

Nobody talks. He pays and they disappear. Everybody lives.

As the trapdoor thumps shut, it sends up a puff of air and dust and small debris, and a bright flutter catches his eye. He's got the payload shoved into the doorframe behind him and his weapon trained on the thing before it hits the floor. He's a breath from shooting it when his visual cortex resolves it and identifies it. A piece of paper, flecked with blood.

He slings his pack down next to it to get at the spare gear, and comes up with it in his gloved hand.

&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;

In the middle of the stack of bills is a personal note, folded once so that its edges don't protrude, small and thin enough not to look like stuffing. She noticed it when she fanned the bills to count them, but let it pass unremarked. He's not the first buyer she's had for this particular product, and they all leave notes for themselves -- gate addresses, serial numbers, passwords. She makes a tidy bonus off each one, trafficking the data on the side. Some of them chip themselves, or show up unknowingly chipped by someone else, but she scanned this one as soon as he passed out, and he's clean. There's only this note, meant for her to find.

The paper is old, crinkly; it's real paper, made from a real tree that grew on some other world long ago, not a smartsheet that mimics every quality of paper except its vulnerability to tearing and burning -- and its inability to smooth out wrinkle-free after being crumpled into a ball.

The words on it, in lead pencil, are written over the ghost of other words, the erasures of at least two other, longer sentences. The last erasure was almost vicious, scraping past the surface finish and leaving a rough nubble that makes the fresh lines look ragged.

Ask Jack to forgive me.

  


'Jack'.

_Jack._

Holy fuck. She knows who this is.

He's coming around, eyes opening like a sleepy child's. While she was staring at the note and connecting the dots, his unconscious body eased into a glowing youthfulness. The process fascinated her the first time she saw it, but she doesn't bother watching anymore. She has other things to do, and it makes her uncomfortable to see the years erased. She should have watched this time. There hasn't been a single image of him in circulation since he reached middle age, but that young face is one of the most recognizable in the galaxy.

She should kill him now, or sell him, or both. They'll find out he's here. They'll be coming for him. They won't ask nicely, and they won't care about collateral damage.

She should use him. Get him a quick-and-dirty facial reconstruction and start training him while they're working on the retinas and fingerprints and voice. His stripped mind will be as inherently brilliant as it was before. He's a blank page waiting to be written into her operation. He'd be invaluable; he'd be worth the risk. It's not as if he has anything else to do, or anywhere else to go.

He sits up, blinking. Focuses on her. Says, "Hi," with a little wave.

She does a perfunctory check of his vitals. Then she draws some blood, splashes it over a few lengths of gauze, and wraps his head and hands so she can say he clawed himself into a bloody mess while he was convulsing. Sometimes they do that.

It'll buy him a little time before her partners find out who he is.

It'll buy her a little time to think, but she's already made her decision.

After all these years of working between the lines of the law, she's still managed to hang on to a corner of her conscience. There's something about this man that makes her want to do the right thing -- trust that if she does the right thing, everything else will work out right. Possibly that's what allowed him to manipulate the people and events he did, and she's just another sucker. But she remembers her family history. Even though it's like a dream of another life now, she remembers the long evenings spent huddled around the fire in the shelter, the threadbare, starving survivors telling stories to keep the identity of their world alive. She remembers the stories her uncle Jared told, of the man who tried to do the right thing and save Tegalus from itself.

Nerinda Kane knows she's a fool and she'll likely die for this.

It's not as if she has anything better to die for.

&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;

He hands the drugmonger a neatly bound sheaf of well-circulated, untraceable bills in the denominations of a dozen worlds. Paper scrip is the currency of the underground, backed by no naquadria standard or virtual complexity of electronic credit. It's felt good to have cash in his pocket after so many years. He's a little sorry to let it go.

"It will all still be there, you know. Beneath the surface of your consciousness. Traces always remain. We've lost the recipe for the original antidote, but there is a device -- I can tell you where it is -- it reconstitutes -- "

"I know," they say.

It is an odd, collective lapse. He has not been "we" in a very long time. He had hoped that encroaching senility would make this unnecessary, had allowed himself to age and decline in hope that biology would do the job for him ... senile plaques in convenient locations might block some of the engrammatic interconnections, fracture the gestalt, free the base mind enough to suppress ...

_cities blooming like flowers in their burning, fire-flowers strewing the globes of worlds, the baleful red eyes of storms aswirl with flame, jewels glowing on the nightside with deep ruby fire, blood-fire_

He does not have time to wait for nature to take its course. No, strike that; he has had, and still has, recourse to technologies and medicines that would give him all the time in the universe. What he does not have is the patience. He is an old, old man who wants no more than all aged men want: To be young again. To start over. To return his brain to the state it began in, solitary and pure, and spend his remaining days being just himself, some semblance of what he could have been emerging from the raw material of neurons washed clean of taint, of toxins.

_the smoldering ruins, the ash that was once the leaves of books, the lore of ages gone to dust on the smoky wind, the first spatter of black rain, the jut of anonymous bone from a muddy grave_

No, strike that. What he wants is what the truly aged truly want: Surcease. Not rejuvenation, not oblivion. Just rest.

He wants to rest.

They all want to rest.

The rogue chemist has filled the syringe, set the little bottle aside, tapped off the air bubbles. She is waiting in silence, further objections and warnings clear in her eyes but stifled on her lips by whatever she confronts in his old, cold stare. He rolls up his sleeve and holds his arm out for the archaic injection. Banned drugs are never produced in derms or inhalers; he saw to that, his iron fist squeezing the black marketeers so tight that they had no means of fabricating more modern delivery methods. The liquid amnesia in that old-fashioned plastic tube was refined long ago into a single-dose youth restorative with no memory effect, cure and antidote in one.

_the silent screams of millions as worlds blow into a trillion constituent parts, the spray of molten mantles into dark vacuum, fire-jewels hanging in the spangled velvet black_

That he will regain a somatic youth is immaterial to him -- as is the fact that use of this primitive form of the drug will render him immune to the revitalizing effects of the refined form in future. Rejuvenation is not the restoration they're interested in.

_it will take four million years for the light of the exploding galaxy to reach his homeworlds_

There is a risk of infection from the needle. He smiles at the thought. What he might catch, allowing it to penetrate his skin. The foreign bodies it might introduce into his body.

The bite of the sharp tip in his vein is the most beautiful pain he has ever felt.

The d'argol is cold, icy cold and pure as the Colorado mountain streams that in moments he will no longer remember, sweet as rain on parched Egyptian sands.

The agony is as terrible and transcendent as orgasm.

_La petite mort_, they think in his third language, as their body convulses.

_The little death_, they think in English, in the many tongues of Talthus, the miner slang of P3R-118, the hissing symbiote language that no Goa'uld host ever spoke and no Goa'uld remain to remember. That extinct race stored genetic memory in the third strand of its triple helix, and as the pain begins to sear their mind into snowy overload, he tries to tie that string around his finger as an aide de memoire. But he has forgotten what it was that he was supposed to remember, the one thing he'd hoped to bring with him through the purging maelstrom, and it's been a long time since he had fingers of his very own to tie strings on.

He surrenders, all of him, to the white fire of sublime annihilation.

&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;

Clue's hands are shaking so badly that it takes him ten minutes to get the weapon loaded.

For the first time in thirty years he has the option of standing in the flush of an establishing wormhole, but he can't bring himself to leave a note or a recording, and he needs to know that the others will be able to find out what happened to him. He needs his body to be the suicide note. He's Mr. Boddy, after all. In the library with the candlestick. In the ballroom with the lead pipe.

He could go back to Galar and graft a complete new set of memories over the ones he can't live with anymore, but he couldn't bear to see that homeworld again, and the older memories would still lurk beneath the surface. He's lived as a haunted man for long enough.

In the billiard room with the rope. In the study with the wrench.

It took decades to subdue the part of him that supported the megalomaniac's every action. It took decades to stop being crippled by guilt and bereavement. It took decades to stop putting the ends before the means. It took decades to get over what they'd done to save the galaxy and acknowledge what he had to do to save the galaxy. It took decades to stop being a party hack and remember that he was a fighting man. That part of him, once, had been a fighting man, and could be again, for just long enough.

_Your memory is less objective than you think it is, Doctor Jackson_ ...

He's helped clear the way. The Lanteans and the Asgard can do the rest. He's given the galaxy back a critical tool it needs to fix itself. It doesn't have to be him, saving it. It was never going to be him anyway. Not after the first time.

_Even if I wanted to help you, there's nothing more I can do_ ...

Maybe Quinta's out there, somewhere; maybe the Wraith haven't gotten her; maybe she can help.

_It was for the good of the project, and Doctor Varrick would have understood that_ ...

Maybe somebody else will get the bastard, maybe there'll be war-crimes tribunals and a public execution, maybe he'll trip and fall down a flight of stairs, slip on soap in the shower, a banana peel in the driveway.

In the kitchen with the dagger.

The only thing he didn't do was fail to live up to the expectation that killing himself would come first, in the end.

In the conservatory with the revolver.

On the road to Hell with the good intentions.

In the cerebral cortex with the .45.

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"Hey Mitchell," Jack says. Then, louder, sharper, a drill-sergeant bark he hasn't used in fifty years: "Mitchell!"

No response. Not even a twitch. Mitchell's just wandering away into the shadows, hunched over like something inside him broke a long time ago and no act of heroism could ever redeem it and he wouldn't give a shit if it could.

Jack dismisses him. Mitchell did his job, brought the gate system back up; that allowed Thor to send Jack directly to this control center, and that's all Mitchell had to have the balls to do. If he let Daniel slip away, well, assassination wasn't his bailiwick or he'd have taken the monster out a long time ago and none of this would be going down the way it is. Spilled milk yadda. He's here now, all kinds of cavalry are coming, and the door's open for the galaxy to be set back to rights.

And Daniel's still alive.

Jack's surrounded by an intensely irritating clamor of people begging for his direction. Begging for General O'Neill's direction, asking him for it by rank and name, and who the fuck would have ever thought anybody'd remember him after all this time, never mind recognize him, never mind expect him to be a take-charge guy who could actually do something about their problems.

He's done being that guy. The man they're clamoring for is a legendary figure from decades ago, and he can't help them. He takes five minutes to deploy the Genii and the Athosians in the most effective way to secure the premises, and then he finds an exit, and he uses it.

Daniel's got maybe a seven-minute head start on him. He'll parlay that into an hour, a day, maybe as much as a month. He's got the advantage of prearranged boltholes, and the bigger advantage of knowing this galaxy like the back of his hand; Jack's an exile returned to a place so changed it'll take him a while to get his bearings. But he knows one thing: he knows what the Daniel Jackson who was his friend, once, would do in this situation, when the construct he'd built had come down around his ears and there was no point in continuing to live with what he'd become.

Jack's the only one who's ever figured out that it wasn't the Others who kicked Daniel out of Ascensionland and it wasn't Oma Desala who wiped his slate clean. Daniel bailed on heaven, by his own choice, and suppressed his own memories, by his own choice -- and got them back, that time, by his own choice. This time, Jack's pretty sure, he won't leave himself that last option.

If there's anything of that Daniel Jackson left in the Milky Way's brilliant, ruthless, genocidal dictator, then he knows where Daniel will go, and when he finds the d'argol he'll find Daniel.

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The reports come in a flood to the inner sanctum, to the sphere of light around the control chair at one end of the vast, shadowy hangar. At the other end is the stargate, shrouded in darkness and dust and cobwebs that Clue knows are meant to be a symbolic contrast to the immaculate state-of-the-art nerve center at this end.

A fleet of Asgard ships has dropped from hyperspace just outside the defensive range of the cordon. The cordon is perfectly operational, but ships have appeared _inside_ it -- surfacing, the reports say, as if from nowhere. The conglomerate has received messages from a Doctor Weir of Atlantis, claiming to be on one of the ships that ran the blockade, offering to negotiate some kind of terms and claiming that a fleet of hiveships is on its way prepared to back up her diplomacy with military might. Lotus has dropped out of contact, and muddled reports are coming in that she's disappeared from her own ship in the middle of interstellar space.

The message from Weir is Clue's signal. The fingers in his pocket find and press the button on the remote control, smuggled in here because he's been a lapdog for so long that even the paranoid tyrant has stopped bothering to watch him. He's beaten, he's whipped, he's been bent over grabbing his own ankles for thirty years, but there's still enough of Cameron Mitchell in him to press this button, this time. There was enough Cameron Mitchell in him to remember the code for reactivating the gate system, the code that the tyrant never knew he'd had, and respond when the woman who was once Samantha Carter sent out the signal.

No one's heard the sound of a stargate's dial turning in this galaxy in three decades. Everyone in the hangar goes stock-still. The chatter and panic and alarms over the comnet fall into a room that's eerily silent except for the rumbling of the gate. The chevrons lock with the finality of prison doors slamming shut. Or more like leghold traps, Clue thinks. There's no way to hold this man prisoner -- if he isn't killed in the first wave, he'll disappear and never be found -- and if it's prison doors, they're opening, not closing.

He's surprised to find that there's some small part of him that still cares enough to smile.

The establishing wormhole floods the hangar with watery blue light. One one thousand, two one thousand, and armed forces are pouring through, Lanteans if the clothes are any indication. They take a couple of shots at the guy in the control chair, but all they manage to do is kill a couple of people in the human shield.

For a shocking second, Clue finds himself taking action. As if his body is controlled by someone else, he wrenches the sidearm from one of the Lanteans and starts to turn, raising the weapon in a two-handed grip, bracing with a muscle memory of training he hasn't used in half a lifetime. For one second, there's a hole, and he has a clear shot, and this time there's no Kreshta to come flying in to take the bullet.

He can't squeeze the trigger. It's all he can do to open his hands and let the weapon drop instead of flipping it around to shove the barrel into his own mouth.

Someone's calling a name. A name he knew, once. A name that meant something to him, a name he was proud of, a name that meant family and honor -- a name that was his when he was a solitary him for it to belong to.

It doesn't mean anything to him anymore. He ignores it and shuffles away into the rippling, dancing shadows cast by the blue fire of the event horizon.

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Standing bent over her communications console, Lotus senses the presence behind her, senses that it is a former host like herself. That was a secret they both kept for a long time: that the naquadah and protein markers left by the symbiotes' residence in their bodies enable them to sense not only living symbiotes but the traces left by symbiotes in other bodies. It took years for the ability to develop, but it was rather handy once it manifested.

Each symbiote's traces are unique, as recognizable as a scent. She breathes deep, and with the smells of ozone from the equipment and stale sweat on leather from her own body comes something that part of her would characterize as smoky, like autumn leaves burned in winter. She's been told she smells of cinnamon, herself, with a touch of myrrh. That's what three of the Ba'als said, at any rate. They all stank of pitch before they stank of death.

She straightens slowly from her console, but doesn't turn. The blow won't come from behind. To the blank grey wall, she says, "And so you are become an assassin at last. Reduced to the level of the Ashrak who killed you."

"I killed myself, that time."

"Then he did his job."

"Turn around, Mal Doran. I won't shoot you in the front, either."

It's been years since she's heard that name. She used it once, long before that, to provide a term for arbitration between disputing parties -- a little joke, she'd thought at the time, but in retrospect a pathetic bid to assert her identity within the confines of a charade. It seems delightfully ironic now.

She makes a seduction of her turning, hips and smile first, then a sinuous roll of bare shoulder that leaves one hand on her waist and one breast lifted to prominence. She holds there, half-turned, striking a pose. "You never trusted me," she says. "Not even when you voted to put that ridiculous patch on my shoulder. Certainly not later, as a stepchild of Egeria. Why should I trust you now?"

"Because I've always told you the truth," says the hard-faced blonde in her side vision. "I am going to kill you. I'm just not going to shoot you."

However she got aboard, however she evaded detection, the defenses would have atomized her if she'd scanned as carrying weapons of any kind, biological or otherwise. "You know I've always been quite keen on going hand-to-hand with you, darling."

The blonde doesn't rise to the bait. She never did, more's the pity -- although she did her share of dangling it, once upon a time. "It's over, Mal Doran. The tyrannical control of this galaxy is ending as we speak."

"If it is, it's no thanks to you, running off to play guerrilla in Pegasus. You always were such a little terrorist at heart." She comes full around to drape herself against the console, give the woman known as Quinta a sultry once-over.

The blue eyes remain fixed on her face. The stance is military parade rest, feet braced at shoulder width, hands clasped behind. The hair is slicked back; it gives the face, which was pretty once, a harsh, masculine cast. "And at heart you're no more than a thief, appropriating the technologies and mythologies of other races."

"We all build on the work of our predecessors," Lotus says with a graceful wave of her hand, as if dismissing effusive praise.

"You were a party to tyranny in the name of unification and efficiency."

"And peace. Don't forget peace." Lotus rises from her draped pose to close the distance between them with slow body-crossing swings of her shapely, leather-clad legs. "No war to speak of in decades," she says, presenting a hipshot mirror of Quinta's stance, arms behind her, face lifted to Quinta's face. "It's gotten really quite dull ... "

"You helped boost a despot into power and watched while he killed millions in developing the ironclad infrastructure you would need when you took control."

Lotus reaches around and up to toy with the tab at the neck of Quinta's flightsuit. "I always prefer to let my men do the heavy lifting."

"Under your direction the galaxy will regress into a place of corruption and enslavement," Quinta says, her voice emotionless, her gaze impenetrable, making no response to Lotus's incursion on her personal space.

"And fancy Little Miss Party Pooper swooping in at this very moment. Under my direction the galaxy will be _fun_ again -- for both of us." She draws the tab down in a languorous exposure, delighted and aroused to find nothing underneath the fabric of the flightsuit. Drawing one fingernail up the center of the cleavage she's revealed, she says, "What would you do with yourself with no evil overlords to fight? If not for me you'd be a rebel without a cause." A brush of nails along the stony jaw elicits not a twitch. "You _need_ corruption and enslavement; it's what you live for. Why else would you have wasted all these years in another galaxy instead of preventing the formation of tyrants here?" The lightest caress of fingertips over the swell of breast raises a nipple to hardness but no blush to the pale cheeks. "You could have killed him. You could have stopped him, once the first objective was secured. Where were you? Turning Wraith into _vegetarians_. A waste of perfectly good predators, by the way, and no alliance you could possibly propose will ever go through -- the people here will never trust that you've tamed the bloody things."

The low voice betrays no response to the hand that slides under the flightsuit's collar to curl around her long, bare neck: "Not if you're in charge of them."

"The people? Don't be stupid," Lotus breathes against the lips she has pulled down just shy of her mouth. "The people will do as they please now, and the first principles of supply and demand will reassert themselves. The conglomerate's flaw was dictating demand. It doesn't matter if it's peace or a healthy diet -- you can't tell people what they should want." She brushes her breath over the cheek that has still failed to flush, raising tiny golden hairs. "I find out what they want and supply it."

"And thereby take charge of them," Quinta says, tonelessly. "Pretending to be their liberator when you're only usurping their last oppressor's position."

Lotus digs nails in along Quinta's spine, flashes teeth in a mock snap at her carotid artery. "All those years you turned a blind eye when it was him, but just as I make my own plans to take charge, here you are, full of self-righteousness." She tips up on her toes, balanced against the control point she maintains on Quinta's neck, to rub against her, nipple on nipple. "How very like you."

"This isn't personal. You're a threat."

"_You_ blew up a _galaxy_, and I'm a threat." She releases her hold abruptly and steps back, her mind turning to other business. "I won't help with your negotiations."

"I know." Quinta doesn't bother to pull her flightsuit's tab back up; her posture returns to true, her hands stay clasped behind her. "You want to keep the power you plan to take, and the easiest way to secure it will be to start a war with someone else."

"And you're too fond of your neutered insects to let me do that, are you? Or is it Atlantis you've gone soft-hearted for? Do they remind you of yourself, in their symbiotic communion with their sentient city?"

By way of reply, Quinta's hard, pinched face curves into a smile that is pure Sam Carter. A chill shivers through the part of Lotus that was Qetesh. A flaring ember of hope burns the part of Lotus that was Vala.

She shakes both off. "Oh, believe what you like. Believe that the moment I have control of those glorified bureaucrats I'll goad them into a preemptive strike against your precious Pegasus and -- "

"I do believe that. I believe that you and I are the last of us, now, or will be soon enough, and from now it will keep coming down to this moment, or one like it."

With silkiest mockery, Lotus says, "And there is nothing you won't do to keep the galaxy safe." She can feel her own dark eyes harden: "Whichever one you feel like protecting this year, and whatever remains of it after the last time you 'secured' it."

"There is nothing I haven't already done," says Jolinar's deep voice, softened by the lightest touch of -- what was her name? The obedient one who found it an honor to serve, no matter what she was told to do, or not to.

It takes a moment for Vala to process the meaning under words Qetesh dismisses as Tok'ra bravado. Then her heart leaps as Qetesh's gut goes cold and Lotus backs away. "What _have_ you already done?" she asks.

"Your defenses scan only for known molecular patterns. I gambled that you would not have installed AI-controlled analyzers; I believed you would be too wary of artificial intelligence turning on you. Had your scanners done more than look for matches in a database, they might have hypothesized the purpose of my altered body chemistry and reported to you before you activated the compound by touching me."

Lotus looks down in horror at the hand that stroked over her adversary's bare skin, registers far too late the sickly sweet odor. Focused on the half-psychic scent of naquadah, she didn't notice that the smell of the host's body had changed -- might not have noticed anyway, it's been so many years since they shared close quarters. "Bloody hell."

"I've been to hell," says the hard-faced blonde, probably all of her speaking although, really, which of them hasn't, and does it even matter anymore? -- unless there's an antidote, some information Lotus can torture or cajole from her before it's too late ... she won't quickly break the Tok'ra or the military scientist, but the obedient one, the one who serves, oh what _was_ her blasted name ... "This is merciful compared with that. But bloody, yes, it will be."

Capillaries are bursting under the flesh of Lotus's hand, a ruddy rash-like bloom before her eyes. By the next blink it has spread halfway up her forearm, gloved her in blood and agony as thousands of microscopic eruptions burst through her skin. She is being flayed alive _from inside_ \-- and yet she is less shocked by that than by the rending she feels deeper still: Qetesh tearing free of the gestalt, fleeing in cowardice to the innermost recesses of their consciousness. Slicing through bonds they've tried everything, would have done anything, to break.

She's always wondered if death would be enough to separate them, for one glorious moment before the end. She never considered that it would come down to half of them running away and leaving the other half to experience death alone.

The spiritual rupture makes her slow to respond, bark orders to voice-activated decontamination systems, stab the button that brings the emergency medical system online. She is dimly aware that Lotus is functioning on autopilot -- that Lotus doesn't know she's dead yet. Like intense pain or pleasure traveling only as fast as nerves can carry it, understanding is slow to arrive and staggering when it hits: She knew. She knew that this would happen, and she distracted the parts of herself that would stop it, even the parts of herself that could be compromised into revealing the knowledge. Vala Mal Doran had centuries of practice keeping secrets from the parasite that had hijacked her body. The one secret she retained the underlying autonomy to keep, she kept adeptly, reflexively, and she kept it even from herself.

The red tide has swept across her torso, down to her groin, her thighs, across to her other arm, up her neck. Before her eyes can fail, she lurches through the red mist of agony to deactivate the emergency systems and seal this control room so that no human or robot guards can enter in time to stop this.

"Vala?" comes a voice slurred with blood.

She just manages to push herself around as her legs collapse, so that she slides down with her back against the red-smeared console, facing the room, and the blonde who has sunk down cross-legged in the center of it. "Yes," she says to the blood-blind eyes, the face that still bears the shape of Sam Carter's though the head appears to have been dipped in hot crimson wax, still bubbling and dripping. "Qetesh has fled. Has Jolinar, as well?"

"We share the pain," Samantha Carter says, with tremendous effort, on a froth of red. "All three of us. We still feel like ... one person. But they've ... pulled back. To let Sam ... to let me ... be ... with ... oh god, it hurts."

Blood soaks her flightsuit from neck to waist, but it looks like her legs might still work. Vala can't raise an arm to beckon, and Sam couldn't see it if she did. "Then be with me," she says. "Come here beside me. Follow my voice."

Somehow Sam crawls on hands and knees to slump next to her against the console. "It'll still take a while," she says. "To shut down the vital organs. I'm sorry. I adapted the -- "

"I can make it faster," Vala says.

"Oh," Sam says. Then, "Yes. Please."

Qetesh is gone, but her centuries of experience in killing are still accessible to Vala. She can no longer move, but with what's available to her via voice command, she can make it almost fast enough that they won't feel it. She doesn't think the microsecond of sensation can be any worse than what they're experiencing now, and it probably won't even register on their overloaded minds. "On my mark," she tells the ship. "Pressurize compartment to ten standard atmospheres. No overrides."

"Thank you," Sam says, a bubble-choked rasp. It's spreading down her throat.

"Don't mention it," Vala says, with what she can still manage of a smile. "Just like old times, eh? Saving the galaxy, together."

"Yes," Sam says. "We've saved ... two galaxies."

"From ourselves," Vala says.

"From ourselves," Sam says.

The dripping tickle down Vala's cheek may be a tear or a drop of blood. She'll never know.

"Mark," she says.

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Quinta stops just short of the threshold. The hatch to the commander's control room is open -- Lotus has that much trust in her ship. Where Quinta stands now, she's just out of range of detection by Lotus's natural sensors, and she can eavesdrop on the audio communication until the connection is cut.

Lotus -- funny that she never considered the name before now. All but one of them took nicknames, handles, callsigns, noms de guerre, opting to use their given names only when they had need to trade on some cachet or authority associated with those identities. None of their original names fit anymore, after a while, and it was easier and more egalitarian to agree on a name that was new for all. Not necessarily devoid of significance for all, however; she took her own handle in memory of her former host whom the Ashrak killed, as apology to the humaniform replicator Fifth whom she betrayed, as remembrance of her family of five in the mines, and as homage to the five-man team she belonged to until she became a one-man team of three. Mitchell named himself for some childhood game; Teal'c dubbed himself _kreshta_, which meant _outcast_. Whether it owed to poetic whimsy or the events of some lifetime lost to the millennia, the lotus -- alongside, no surprise, the snake -- was central to Qetesh's mythology; Quinta hopes that Vala acquiesced out of her own fondness for blossoms in general -- worn in the hair, brightening her underground quarters, decorating the restaurant where she had her "little date" with Daniel -- and not in submission to her onetime master. Quinta remembers the negotiations, the compromises necessary to keep peace within herself, in those early days. She can only imagine the battles Vala conceded in hope of winning her war.

The conversation within continues, carried by tightbeam across the light-years. They know about the other ship. They've cracked the signal sent to Clue and deduced its meaning. They've intercepted the messages from the other ship, though they haven't yet triangulated a location. They know that the humans and the Wraith have allied to unify the Pegasus Galaxy, and they know why and how. They know they will have to move much sooner than they had planned.

None of it matters; none of Lotus's schemes will come to anything now. Quinta has a package to deliver, a viral-nanomolecular scourge of her own design and tailored to her own body chemistry. None of her constituent minds could have done the work on their own; it required the combined expertise of all three, and along with the alteration that allowed the Wraith to feed on the life force of flora rather than fauna, it is her greatest work as a gestalt consciousness. Based partly on the DNA of Prior-engineered adaptivorous bugs and partly on the nanoviruses of the Pegasus Replicators, it is itself a hybrid. It will remain dormant until the target's skin oils activate it, and then be unstoppably, incurably fatal -- to them and no one else. Her own body was the only viable delivery system.

That's nothing new. She's always been a weapon, of one kind or another.

This is the first time she's been a human sacrifice, but she's owed the universe this penance for decades piled on millennia, and it feels good to be so close to paying her debt.

"Keep me apprised, darling," she hears the captain say. "Lotus out."

She steps in.

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In essence, she crawls under the fence.

In normal space, using their fastest sublight drive, it would take her four standard days to cross from beyond the range of the cordon's outer proximity sensors to beyond the range of its inner proximity sensors. In hyperspace, using the hyperdrive technology of the Asgard or the Goa'uld or the Ancients, it would take a couple of seconds to jump the same distance. In hypospace -- a dimension "below" normal space the way hyperspace is "above" it, and "slower" than normal space the way hyperspace is "faster" -- it takes her a month ... but she is indetectable to the cordon's sensors and unreachable by its weaponry, both of which extend hyperspatially but not hypospatially.

She designed the cordon that way deliberately. No good programmer codes an application without leaving herself a backdoor. She's not proud of the cordon, which she designed and implemented in collaboration, but at the time there was nothing she wouldn't do to keep the galaxy safe -- and at the time none of their potential attackers were using hypospace drives. And she's not above patting herself on the back for her strategy. Her collaborator possessed an expertise in Goa'uld technology, but no part of him was an astrophysicist and no part of him was friendly with Radek Zelenka, and so he wasn't aware of the hypospace theory Zelenka was developing. She betrayed him only by omission. It's the only nearly undetectable way.

The moment her ship surfaces into normal space she presses the controls to send three databursts. One is directed to a set of predetermined coordinates, a coded message that says "Made it." One is a wide-dispersal signal intended for the man that part of her once knew as Cameron Mitchell; if he gets it, and acts on it, it will make things easier for a lot of other people, but if he doesn't it won't affect her own actions one way or another.

The third is to a little-used comm node in the Virgo Cluster that will begin distribution of a self-propagating, self-replicating code across the galactic net. All that the code does is send a single-kilobyte unencrypted ASCII text message to a list of aliases until one of the messages is opened and acknowledged with a specific response code. The core protocol dates back to the late twentieth century, developed as a way for the original members of a team called SG-1 to communicate with each other should apocalyptic events leave some semblance of the Internet functional but separate them and make direct contact unadvisable. The message reads, "Goodbye, sir. It was an honor and a privilege." Its recipient has been lost in the gulf between the stars for decades, and she does not believe he will ever return to this galaxy to pick up his messages. She's not entirely sure why she bothers to send it. But it takes less than a second of her time and uses negligible resources, and something inside her rests a little easier when it's done.

She takes the hypodrive offline, brings the primary drive out of standby, and jumps to another set of coordinates. Within an hour she receives a mirror of her first message. It tells her that Sheppard has flown Weir safely under the cordon. He doesn't know what Quinta has really come to do; it will really, _really_ piss Weir off, and she couldn't risk Sheppard telling Weir while Weir could still do something to stop her, even order Sheppard to track her down and disable her ship. Teyla knows, and when Quinta doesn't come back, she's authorized to tell McKay, and McKay will tell Sheppard.

_It's my honor to serve_, she thinks, half wry, half deeply sincere.

It takes her three hours, combing through ship chatter and hacking her way through manifests and flight plans and surveillance data on the comnet, to determine a general location for Lotus's personal vessel, _Pyrrha_. It takes her three oblique jumps to get there undetected, but as she drops out of hyperspace she receives an immediate visual of the souped-up al'kesh with the distinctive snake-and-lotus sigil on its side, painted bloom-over-figure-eight-serpent to resemble a skull and crossbones from shooting distance.

It takes her twenty minutes to analyze the emission patterns of _Pyrrha_'s shields and calibrate her own ship's souped-up beam transporter to penetrate them.

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"Radek," McKay says, a fierce smile slanting across his face, his eyes fever-bright as they check and re-check what's on his notebook screen and _still_ find no errors. What he's looking at is his own work, troubleshooting the most recent hypodrive test engine, but the theory was Zelenka's and this owes everything to him. "Radek, Radek, Radek. You are a genius. And I'm finally going to get to say that to your face." He pauses, then adds, "OK, _eventually_ I'll get to say that to your face."

His departmental staff and assistants, a motley crew of Wraith and Athosians and Genii and humans from planets throughout the Pegasus Galaxy, pay him no mind; he mutters to himself all the time while he works. But they do look up when he activates his radio and says, "Elizabeth? Rodney. I know how to fix it." His smile curls and he sits back in satisfaction and folds his arms across his chest. "You'll be on your way to Earth within the year."

"That's wonderful news," she says.

The pleasure in her rich, warm voice is genuine, but he can hear the wan, unspoken thought behind it: _A pity that General O'Neill couldn't wait for us to build him a ride home_.

It did take a little longer than McKay had anticipated, and he didn't think the general would have hung around if he knew the bus wasn't coming for _thirty years_.

On the other hand, O'Neill's way didn't exactly work, did it? And now his -- and Radek's -- has.

It always does, eventually.

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Jack feels the ship jolt into normalspace, and his heart drops into his gut.

"The hyperdrive has failed, sir."

Well, it wasn't like they hadn't known the ship could be a lemon. Never buy a used spacecraft from the Ancients, that's what he's always said.

At sublight speed, it'll take them several hundred years to get back to Pegasus, twice that to get to Ida. Even if they had some of that fountain-of-youth drug on board, even if they had enough to keep them alive that long, they'd run out of water, food, and power long before they got to either. They're provisioned for fifty years, but between the galaxies is raw, empty vacuum. No planets they can hit up for supplies, no asteroids they can mine, no solar winds. Just a whole lot of nothing.

The crew works the problem for three hours. He's about ready to give a short 'we're screwed, suck it up, make the best of it' speech when the chief engineer comes up to the bridge in person and says, "I think I can baby her through a series of short jumps. It won't get us there fast, but it'll get us there in our lifetimes. Thirty years to the Asgard's galaxy, fifteen to get home."

_Tria_ is crewed by recruits trained up fast, had more chutzpah than sense when they signed on, whole lives still ahead of them. In ten years these kids won't even be thirty yet.

He's opening his mouth to issue the order to turn back when his navigator says, "If I get a choice, I'd like to keep going, sir."

"So would I," says the kid on comms, and the engineer, and then they're all chiming in, and instead of reminding them that this is a command hierarchy, Jack finds himself calling for a vote.

It's unanimous: They'll complete the mission to Ida.

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Jack slams the table. "OK, that's it. I'm going to the Asgard." When Earth's stargate stopped taking their calls he was ready to commandeer the Ancients' ship and fly home, but he let Weir talk him out of it -- they needed him here, they needed _Tria_ here, and as far as Earth was concerned _Tria_ was a Replicator vessel now and they'd throw everything they had at it the second it came within range. He grudgingly agreed that the risk didn't factor out and that yeah, they did need him here; he was one-eighth of the entire Atlantis operational staff at the time. He promised her a year and ended up giving her three. In light of this new intel, he's not hanging around anymore.

Weir says, "I'm afraid I can't let you do that. Two hyperdrive ships are one hundred percent more defense against the Wraith than we had yesterday -- "

"And if you had ten it would be five times better than two and if you had a hundred it would be ten times better than that and it still wouldn't be enough." She wouldn't want to part with a single ship no matter how many she had, for the same reasons she wouldn't authorize reconnaissance to Earth back at the start. "And that's 'General' to you, Doctor."

She lifts her chin and says, "From what I just heard, the American military that vested your authority no longer exists. I'm in charge here. Jack."

Softly, he replies, "I will just take the ship, Elizabeth. _I trained your troops_. You know that I can take every guard in this city if I have to."

"You can't take me," Ronon says.

Jack gives him a slow, lazy _wanna find out?_ smile.

What's supposed to happen then is that Weir gets fed up with the testosterone standoff and agrees to some kind of compromise just to calm everybody down, but the moment is broken by a flood of irritated babble from McKay that ends, to Jack's surprise, in "Oh come on Elizabeth just let him take the ship." Somewhere in there he made a lot of good points about how O'Neill's personal connection with Thor is the only way they'll ever get through to the Asgard and how much they still need the Asgard's help and how long it's going to take to develop a working prototype of a hypodrive engine without them, but he managed to cram it all into the time it would have taken Jack to say one sentence. Sheppard and Beckett back him up, and after a minute Emmagan does too, and it's clear where Ca-- where Quinta stands on the whole thing. Dex doesn't care, and Woolsey's on the mainland ...

"All right," Weir says at last. "But on one condition: that if the Asgard agree to provide or are capable of providing only limited help, you put Atlantis first. You bring them here before you get yourself killed trying to run that blockade."

He agrees to her terms because he's sure that if they don't shoot him on sight as a Replicator, or bar the doors like the Milky Way did, or declare that they've washed their hands of the fifth race completely, they'll be fully capable of sending aid to both galaxies at the same time.

He's done all he could for this colony. He's going to Ida, and then Thor's going to finagle a way to get him home.

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Elizabeth watches O'Neill's face age ten years as he listens to the report from the one person who managed to escape the Milky Way Galaxy before it sealed itself off for good.

It's a sad thing to witness. When _Daedalus_ first made contact, he'd lit up with an animation she'd never seen in him before. He'd shouted "Carter!" and looked like he was ready to grab the screen by the shoulders and lift it off its stand for a hug of triumph. But it wasn't his old teammate at the helm; it wasn't the Air Force officer Elizabeth had known and respected. It was a self-described 'gestalt personality', part Samantha Carter and part Tok'ra and part the constructed consciousness of a power-plant operator named Thera. And the story she had to tell of what had happened back home had brought a lined, granite weariness down on O'Neill.

What's hit him hardest is the news about Daniel Jackson. "Nothing you've reported explains that kind of ... _insane_ behavior," he says harshly to the solitary refugee sitting alone among the Atlantis senior staff at the briefing table.

"Not insane," Quinta says. "Not yet. Brutally efficient and undeniably effective."

"But getting crazier by the minute."

"Yes."

"Why? Because his head's stuffed with _Stromos_ crew and he can't hide from them this time? He's got more strength of will in one _neuron_ than most people have in -- "

"It is not just the _Stromos_ constructs. Not just the ... miner Carlin." It's interesting how she stumbles over the mention of a man that part of her remembers growing up with -- and that the rest of her knows is an extrapolation from the sketchy remains of an artificial personality stamp, a person who never had independent existence or a real life. How different is that, Elizabeth wonders, from the knowledge that her own self-awareness is no more than electrochemical impulses across synaptic networks? Elizabeth herself has lived lives that never happened. She knows all too well how the boundaries can blur. "His mind also contained the memories of what he experienced during the visions imposed on him by his wife Sha're through the ribbon device her symbiote was using to kill him, and by the Harsesis child as an object lesson in how the genetic memory of the Goa'uld would corrupt him."

"You're saying that those ... other lives he felt like he lived, those other ... Daniels ... got made into personalities with as much claim to his head as he has?"

Quinta nods. "Kreshta -- we knew him as Teal'c -- suffered similarly. The self he believed himself to be after he was brainwashed by the Goa'uld Apophis was reconstituted in him the same way."

_Oh that's just great_, O'Neill's face says, _since we all remember what a barrel of laughs Teal'c was back then_. The expressive roll of his eyes is intended for Carter; he's trying from old habit to convey something through the long-established silent communication of close companions.

Quinta makes no visible response. She is relentless, single-minded, as unbreachable as the galaxy she just left. The past is context to her, data; it carries no emotional resonance. O'Neill can't talk to her anymore. Not in the private language of old friends. She understands him, but she won't engage.

Elizabeth feels sorry for O'Neill, but it's Samantha Carter she truly pities.

"He never told me what he saw," O'Neill says now. He rubs a forefinger over a spot on the table, drops his gaze. It looks casual, but it's not. His mouth is a hard, thin line, but there's a soft hurt in his eyes that he's guarding from the rest of them. "He told me it was bad, and that was it." He looks up. "I think he told Teal'c. Did he tell you?"

"He would not have wanted you to know the details," Quinta says. "Your friendship did not fare well in those visions." Not pausing to let him absorb that, she forges ahead: "And neither did the world, in the vision the Ascended being Shifu subjected him to. Deep in his mind were the memories of everything he learned during the life he lived in that vision -- every technical specification of every weapon, for example. We built the cordon on those designs, although I developed them extensively, far beyond what his secondhand expertise could have accomplished on its own."

"But he's a bright guy," O'Neill says, darkly.

"He has the combined resources of every institution and all the most brilliant minds on your planet at his disposal, and an indomitable desire to make and keep the galaxy secure. He has not fostered peace and cooperation; he has instituted them. If things keep on the way they're going, as his power increases so will his mental and emotional instability." A grim smile touches her lips for the first time: "But the galaxy will be very, very safe."

Elizabeth fears that this will be too much for O'Neill to recover from. His old second-in-command come back to him a stranger, his closest friends deeply, unimaginably compromised, cut off from his home galaxy when he must feel it needs him most. That worries her not because she feels for him but because _she_ needs him. She'd like to help Earth too, she'd like to rush back and pull her native galaxy back from the brink of totalitarian dystopia; that's a calling she's more suited for than this one, come right down to it -- a challenge of political negotiation, when here at home she's a wartime commander-in-chief. But their priority has to be Atlantis, and if she loses him to despair -- loses the charismatic warrior who took the Genii by the scruff of the neck and brought them into the Lantean fold, loses the tactician she relies on in the struggle against the Wraith, loses his energy and ingenuity -- she's afraid they'll lose the larger battle. All the humans of the Pegasus Galaxy depend on her, and she depends on him.

Then his hands come down flat and hard on the table, and a man she's never seen before rises up behind his rugged face and his dark eyes. She remembers confronting him across a table very like this, six long years ago. Her mind had been filled to overflowing with seven years of SGC mission logs, and his had been filled to bursting with the data of an Ancient repository. Neither of them had slept the night before; both of them were haggard, overwhelmed, hanging on by their fingernails; neither of them had been willing to yield. In all this time, she realizes now, she's never met the real Jack O'Neill. But she's looking at him now.

In that eyeblink moment, she hopes that whatever he's about to declare is something she can twist to benefit Atlantis, because there's going to be no standing in its way.

&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;

_// If I do not believe in him how can I serve? //_

Kreshta sees Bra'tac lift his ancient staff weapon to target DanielJackson, hears the click and whine as it opens and activates, sees the glow of godsfire slither from its mouth to wreath its head in an electric crackle, smells the whiff of ozone that presages fiery death.

_// If I do not believe in him how can I serve? // Because there is no other choice ... //_

Kreshta launches himself from the shadows, bringing his own staff weapon to bear. Flying through the artificial atmosphere of the space station, he hears voices in his head, shreds of arguments and conversations from his many pasts -- from one past in particular, singing through his mind's ear the way the humans claim to see their lives flash before their mind's eyes in the moment of death.

_// I saw the spark of doubt in you, and the wisdom to keep that doubt to yourself. I saw you play the game with those who would play god. // If I do not believe in him how can I serve? // Because there is no other choice ... //_

DanielJackson exterminated the Tok'ra. DanielJackson is attempting to subjugate the Free Jaffa by limiting the production and supply of tretonin. DanielJackson has become as cruel and capricious a tyrant as any Goa'uld System Lord.

_// My entire life you have prepared me for this day. Why? // I saw the spark of doubt in you, and the wisdom to keep that doubt to yourself. I saw you play the game with those who would play god. // If I do not believe in him how can I serve? // Because there is no other choice ... //_

DanielJackson destroyed his lord Apophis.

_// If I do not believe in him how can I serve? // Because there is no other choice but to serve. //_

His master has been Bra'tac. His master has been the machines that warm their burrow below the glaciers. His master has been Apophis. His master has been freedom. His master has been Qetesh.

He has thrown off all of those masters -- Qetesh most easily of all, once their common purpose of hunting the Goa'uld to extinction was fulfilled, but he was lost after that, wandering, uneasy in his mind and unable to fully commit to the alliance between Tok'ra and Free Jaffa, unable to dedicate himself to their rebellion, unmoved when it failed. They conspired against DanielJackson, Lotus conspires against him still; he was too deeply weary of insurrection to involve himself in their schemes and righteous causes. Even Bra'tac seemed diminished to him, a blustering old man who counseled collaboration and called it heroism.

It was only when he learned that Bra'tac -- dying, his body no longer able to absorb the tretonin that kept him alive -- planned to engineer a glorious end for himself by giving his life in the act of assassinating the man who is slowly choking the Free Jaffa to death, that his deepest, truest purpose rose up from within him, tolling in his heart like a clear, sweet bell.

His greatest, truest master was friendship, and loyalty was his god, love and sacrifice his forms of worship. Faith in his comrades was ever the only faith worthy of his embrace. He lives to serve, and in this last act, in his dying act, he serves all the gods who matter.

Whatever DanielJackson has become and whatever acts DanielJackson may commit, DanielJackson is his friend, and he now gives his life in service of that friendship.

Bra'tac fires. The blast scores a direct hit on Kreshta as his flying leap carries him through the line of sight. Kreshta fires simultaneously, and the discharge from his staff blasts Bra'tac in the chest and sends him flying back into the shadows.

They are both dead before they hit the walls that DanielJackson built.

&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;

All the status lights indicating the readiness of the galactic cordon go to green.

Satellites the size of stellar white dwarves come to glowing life on all the viewscreens. Clue, who has abandoned his callsign Shaft in favor of the name of an old children's boardgame for reasons that are obscure to the rest of them but appear to amuse him, has dubbed them Death Stars. He has been instrumental in controlling the military and civilian leadership of Earth, their former base, and so they put up with his flights of pop-culture whimsy.

Except for operational staff, it is only the two of them here on the new space station, in the vast central control complex at one end of which the old Russian stargate is displayed like one of the artifacts one of them used to be so fond of collecting. Quinta has fled -- to Pegasus, most likely, into the arms of her surrogate-father-cum-object-of-desire -- which is just as well considering what they are about to do here. Lotus is off 'on safari', running the last of the Goa'uld to ground and exterminating them as the reward she's earned for taking the Lucian Alliance in hand and merging the rest of the galaxy's fledgling crime syndicates into one streamlined operation that they can supervise and manipulate to their own ends. She has taken her First Prime with her.

Kreshta would have been better deployed, they think, as a political crowbar to separate the Jaffa from the Tok'ra. That unlikely alliance has proven to be the sharpest thorn in their side. But they have recently received intelligence placing the Tok'ra's latest base on a planet in the Epsilon Geminorum system, and as of now they have a more direct way to dispense with the troublesome rebels. Most of them never had the patience for politics anyhow, and the Tok'ra are genetically predisposed to insurrection; the Tok'ra will never be good citizens of Utopia because they will always be looking for something to rise up against.

But they will have other uses for Kreshta when Lotus returns, and he is at heart _shol'va_ and will not be hard to turn. They all have their purposes -- even Quinta, whose brilliant minds were invaluable to them during design and implementation of the cordon, and who by exploiting an overlooked loophole in the array to make her escape identified that loophole and allowed them to close it. No one else will be going out now, to run for help or to betray them to external forces or for any other reason. And no one else will ever come in.

A wave of dizziness and a briefly nauseating nail-in-the-head pain remind them that the insurrections of the mind are not so simply dealt with. They are the only gestalt consciousness that did not take a single name and does not conceive of itself as an 'I'; they are working on that, but it may be some time yet before they have put down all the internal rebellions. The maddening child who will not stop crying, the woman shrieking and shrieking in frustration and outrage, the constant pressure of the parts of them that refuse to understand that this _is_ service, they _are_ serving -- they are securing the galaxy and saving it from itself. Without the structure they have begun to impose, it would be a chaos of warring star systems, criminal syndicates, interspecies conflicts, arms races. Even the root personality can understand the concept of benevolent dictatorship. Eventually they will bring him around, and the rest will fall into line. In the meantime, they suffer what they must.

They master themselves, and double-check the coordinates on the screen below them.

"Target is locked," says the operator at the weapons console. Eyes never leaving his own screen, he says, "Will you activate from your station, sir?"

They smile, and turn to Clue, and gesture to the relevant controls. "Why don't you do the honors, old friend?"

Clue's head jerks up as though he's taken a bullet.

"Please. Did you really think I invited you here to _watch_?"

Clue is a bright guy. He knows that if he commits this act, there will be no turning back. He knows that in activating that weapon he will change his complicity into full-blown culpability. He's also two men who were accustomed to command and might crave it again if he's not brought to heel once and for all. And he's a man who always pulled the trigger when he was told to.

"It's not as if this will be the first time," they remind him bluntly. "A few refugees in a convoy, a few thousand Tok'ra on a rebel base -- the difference is of degree, not kind."

Clue steps to the weapons console, then can't seem to bring his hands up to the controls.

"We swore there was nothing we wouldn't do to make the galaxy safe," they say. Gently now, with almost tender patience, playing good cop to their own bad cop. "This will make the galaxy safe. Are you part of the problem or part of the solution?"

Clue's hands come up to hover over the controls. He blinks, swallows -- and activates the weapons.

The energy beams, crossing from above and below the plane of the ecliptic, slice the planet like a fruit. Molten mantle sprays like hot juice into the void, boiling the wreath of clinging atmosphere off in wisps of superheated steam. They imagine they can hear the silent screams of the dying, but what they're hearing is the screams in their own mind.

&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;

Research testing on the Sangreal determines that its emissions increase exponentially when it is bombarded with electromagnetism in the infrared and ultraviolet frequencies. Shine enough of the right light on it and it takes out any Priors within a radius of five AUs. That they've captured enough stray Priors to test this on ceases to concern them overmuch once their project is complete.

What they design and build is not the Sangreal amplifier they originally conceived, but something that Mitchell, in his down-home simplicity, calls a cosmic coupler. "Upconverter" might be a more accurate word, but they don't care about terminology as much as they used to.

The amplifier is the supermassive quasar-like core of the Ori galaxy itself. Galactic-core outbursts are the most energetic phenomena in the universe, emitting galactic superwaves of high-energy cosmic rays in vast barrages; among the x-rays and gamma rays are infrared and ultraviolet emissions that will excite the astronomically minute Sangreal to its peak capacity. The coupler enables the Sangreal's emissions to 'ride the wave' -- capitalizing on a synergistic effect that will cause them to propagate along quantum rather than Newtonian trajectories. Within twelve Terran hours of deployment, all the Ascended in the Ori galaxy will be destroyed. At the end of those twelve hours, if the Sangreal is not uncoupled from the core or its converter deactivated, the quantum backflow will initiate a cascade reaction down into the superdense exotic matter at the galaxy's heart, and the galaxy itself will be annihilated.

The core region of any galaxy is a maelstrom of solar winds, twisted magnetic field lines, vast bubbles and dense clouds of gases, close-packed stars buffeted by cosmic rays and crosshatched with plasma filaments. Given the physical conditions beyond the launch point and the material limits of their spacecraft, it will not be possible for any organic life-form to uncouple the Sangreal or deactivate the converter and survive. Any timed automatic shutoff they attempted to build in would run the risk of going off ahead of schedule, and no remote deactivation signal can travel through the maelstrom. None of them is willing to make the sacrifice of staying with the device until the time comes to shut it down.

They leave it on, and gate back to the Milky Way.

In the event, Carter and Jolinar and Thera's calculations prove to be off by a couple of hours. It takes them ten hours to return to the supergate via hyperspace, and approximately five seconds after they emerge from the wormhole on the other side, the supergate behind them collapses on itself -- appears, in fact, to melt, in a visually spectacular, Daliesque fashion -- and is sucked into the singularity that powered it.

"Failsafe," Jolinar says, watching the demise of the supergate dispassionately. "The gate on the other end must have been destroyed."

"So, it worked," says Vala eagerly. "We wiped out the Ori."

"The Ori and the entire Ori galaxy. And all life that existed there, in any form that we understand."

"Pity," says Qetesh.

"Indeed," says Teal'c.

"Can we see where their galaxy was from here?" asks Marell.

"Not with any telescopic equipment aboard this craft," says Carter. "With something like the Hubble, maybe. But it will take four million years for the light of the explosion to reach this galaxy."

"We'll simply have to ensure that we're still around to see it," Vala says, or perhaps Qetesh; perhaps thinking of sarcophagi, perhaps of d'argol or something else. It doesn't matter; everything is possible now, even immortality.

But first they have to finish securing this galaxy. The Ori have been defeated as the Goa'uld System Lords were before them, but the danger is by no means over; if they've learned anything in their combined lives and experiences, it's that there will always be another, more seemingly insurmountable threat. Their galaxy drifts alone in the great void, unshielded, unprotected, vulnerable to attack from without and infiltration from within.

They are the galaxy's protectors, and their work has only begun.

&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;

As Colonels Mitchell and Carter sit down at the dialing console to do whatever they're going to do to deactivate the stargate network -- something Harriman didn't think was possible and can't imagine how they figured out how to do, unless it's something they learned from the Ori databases -- he moves to the stairs to return to his office and the pile of messages he has to prioritize for the general's callbacks. As he climbs, their voices drift up to him.

Colonel Mitchell asks Colonel Carter, in the voice that doesn't really sound like his voice anymore, "What do you think he said to the President?" Then, after a pause the duration of a chevron locking: "What do you think he _did_ to the President?"

Colonel Carter replies, in the voice that sounds even less like her own voice, "Whatever he had to."

&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;

They're his people, two of his people come back just when he was about to declare them officially MIA and contact the families. It's one of the most heart-lifting sights a commander can ever be treated to.

But they're people he doesn't know at all, making claims and demands that boggle the mind. Merlin's weapon, Priors wiped out except they might've missed a few so it's imperative to shut down the gate system to hobble them, Ori armies pledged to SG-1's service, the imminent arrival of the Ori themselves, all the resources of Area 51 and a dozen high-profile R&amp;D facilities to be put at their disposal immediately -- he'd wave it off as a load of hooey if it were anyone else, and he'd go to bat for them without blinking if he believed it was really them.

Mitchell's carrying himself like he's got a rod up his spine, and every sentence ends on the same note, like a bad musical composition. He acts by turns furtive and brusque, he's acquired a bad facial tic, and he's not making eye contact. Carter, on the other hand, couldn't have a flatter affect. Aside from the altered presentation, they're both pale and haggard, and because they refused the pre-debriefing physicals, it's starting to look like he might need to have them zatted or tranked. What he really wants is to put them through a psych eval. He gets that they suffered some kind of ordeal offworld, but he's seen a lot of guys, a lot of friends, come back from some very bad places, Nam worst of all, and none of them came back changed this way.

"Now, wait a minute," says the on-site IOA rep -- who's broken protocol by entering the gateroom with the SFs still on high alert, but Landry's going to have to deal with the Committee sooner or later, so screw it. "Shouldn't we leave well enough alone now that we've beaten them back? If they can't come through the supergate ... "

"They'll build another one somewhere else," Mitchell says. "We'll be playing cat-and-mouse until our resources are exhausted."

"Perhaps they will simply move on to easier hunting grounds," the IOA rep says. "Perhaps we have made ourselves too expensive a proposition."

"This is neither a strategy session nor a negotiation," Carter says. "I'm going to shut down the network of stargates and begin work on the Sangreal amplifier immediately. You _will_ comply."

Before Landry can answer, the IOA rep has launched into a numbing description of the levels of approval that would be required even to begin to meet these demands, but he lets it run on because Lam and her team have arrived and he needs to know if these people are carrying snakes.

They've just been pronounced Goa'uld-free when Harriman's voice comes over the PA from up in the control room: "General Landry, Comms is receiving reports that more than three dozen very large spacecraft have taken up stationkeeping around the planet. ... Update, sir: Forty-two Ori warships."

"That'll be our fleet," Mitchell says. "I wouldn't shoot if I were you."

Then Harriman again: "General Landry, the President is on the line."

With a muttered oath, Landry goes up to take the call in the control room. While he's advising the President to refrain from activating any defenses until they've had more time to debrief their operators, the intercom relays the conversation from the gateroom below, and in moments he's ready to rip that IOA moron a new one.

"Dammit, LaPierre," he barks into the mic, "I'm not convinced these officers aren't compromised. Shut your mouth or you'll be out of this facility on your pencil-pushing ass." It's the last time he'll let one of these petty loudmouths violate protocol -- but the damage is already done. Mitchell asked why Woolsey wasn't there and next thing LaPierre had given an all-too-concise summary of the Atlantis foothold situation and the _Daedalus_ tasking -- and, possibly worst of all where this particular team is concerned, the current location of General O'Neill.

Sure enough, Mitchell's whipped out some kind of communication device. When the SFs warn him, he holds it up for Landry to see and says, "I just want to contact Doctor Jackson. He's on one of the ships now in orbit."

"Yeah, you go ahead and do that, son," Landry says into the mic. "You tell him to get _his_ ass down _here_, and then you bring in the rest of your team for evaluation, and then we'll talk some more."

With a glance at the French IOA rep, Mitchell activates the device and speaks into it -- in goddamn Mandarin Chinese. "Jackson says give him forty minutes and then call the President back," Mitchell says when he's signed off. For that moment he sounds like the team leader Landry sent out through that gate three months ago -- but the absence of the "sir" at the end rings like a klaxon in the concrete bunker. "Oh -- and he said to turn on CNN."

Landry gestures to an airman behind him to go ahead and put the television feed on one of the monitors. He continues to question Mitchell and Carter for the next twenty minutes -- establishing nothing except that their stories hold up well under interrogation and there's still some critical omission he can't pin down -- and then he hears the airman behind him say, "Uh ... sir?"

He turns, and follows the airman's gaze up to the CNN feed, and sees an Ori warship landing just to the west of the Mall in Washington, D.C.

"Now, that's a sexual image I really didn't need to be seeing right now," the intercom relays Mitchell saying, as the elongated-doughnut vessel fits itself precisely to the area of the grounds it's landing on by settling over and _around_ the Washington Monument -- and he knows the screen is big enough for them to make it out from down on the ramp too.

The camera is jolted by fleeing pedestrians, panicked civilians running wildly in all directions; then it steadies as phalanx after phalanx of Ori troops debark from the vessel, and pans after their orderly march. Another camera picks them up from an angle somewhere down Constitution Avenue, and then the view switches back to the first camera and shows Daniel Jackson, in frayed BDUs with the SGC patches still affixed, walking calmly and purposefully out of the ship and after the troops, with another phalanx on his heels.

"Find me a bird that can see the White House," Landry says to the sergeant on comms duty. The news agencies can't get helos into the no-fly zone, and he needs some kind of an aerial, preferably satellite. The phones are lighting up with calls from every department of the military that knows the SGC exists. _And the goddamn head of Homeworld Security's offworld and probably dead. Isn't that a kick in the rear._ Wasn't enough he took over for O'Neill here; now he's the de-facto HS go-to guy. "Get Hammond on the line and get him briefed," he says to Harriman. "You personally, Walter. Then start shunting some of these calls off to his office."

"He's with the President now, sir, and on his cell phone," Harriman says, tapping his headset. "They're being moved to ... I'm sorry, sir, the connection cut out."

Landry gives the comms officer some boilerplate to feed the staff fielding the calls, then watches the feeds coming up on the various monitors -- sat images, NORAD, news stations. The troops have split into three columns, moving across the Ellipse and in parallel down the streets to either side. They converge on the White House and overwhelm the military and Secret Service with sheer numbers -- and with weapons that he hopes to hell are set on stun, because a lot of men and women are going down. BBC World gets a good shot of Doctor Jackson entering the White House through the front entrance, his troops clearing the way for him through a stream of evacuees.

On TV, it looks like medieval Crusaders storming the capital with Buck Rogers zap guns.

It's a blatant, destructive, possibly insane stunt, and it's been staged to make a point -- to the world, to the U.S. government, to the IOA, to the SGC, and to him.

For ten minutes there's nothing they can do but wait and tell everyone else to do the same. There's no word from the White House situation room. Secret Service will have moved the President to the most secure possible location, but he doesn't think there was time to get him off the premises entirely, so now it's a question of how far Jackson will go to force an audience and whether Hayes can override his bodyguards if he decides -- as Landry suspects he will -- that he wants to talk to this guy. Harriman told Hammond that the man on his way was purportedly Daniel Jackson. Hayes knows Jackson -- even, Landry thinks, has developed a personal affection and respect for the man, for himself and through his relationship with O'Neill. Landry thinks he might almost trust this President to assess Jackson's identity and state of mind.

The phones don't stop blinking, but finally the comms officer holds a receiver out to Landry and says, "The President for you, sir."

"Mr. President," Landry says into the phone.

"Yeah, Hank," Hayes says. "Call _Daedalus_ back, shut the gate system down, and give those folks there with you whatever they need -- my staff will connect you with JPL, NASA, MIT, any brain trusts or think tanks or research facilities they want. Oh, and Hank? Hold on to your hats over there. I'm giving a press conference in fifteen. Your program's going public."

&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;

Their first order of business is to shut down the new supergate the Ori built while they were playing hide-and-seek in the Emerald City and dial back out to the Ori galaxy so that the enemy can't send more warships or Priors or gate through themselves. The codes are in each Ori ship's database, easily hacked now that they have control. The supergate is guarded by eight sentry ships. With their twenty ships, approaching as friendlies, it's a simple enough matter to destroy those eight ships before they can transmit distress messages home or to the other ships throughout this galaxy. They reset the supergate, and they leave Mal Doran (they have agreed for the time being to use their root names) with two other ships to guard the gate in turn and keep the connection open.

Their second order of business is to capture or destroy all other Ori ships in this galaxy -- and eliminate as many Priors as they can in the process. They have some concern that in death the Priors might transmit telepathic messages to one another that would alert the quarry to the situation and their own jeopardy, but that appears not to be the case; using the logistical information and locators on their ships, they pick off thirty-four Priors one by one, and more than double their fleet strength. The last planet they liberate is populated by humans oddly resistant to giving up their newfound belief system. They start to shrug and go on their way; what threat can these few hundred thousand preindustrial people be, worshipping beings who are not currently present in this galaxy, reading their Book of Origin and vainly waiting for their gods show up? Then they catch a native activating the planet's stargate with the intent of organizing resistance on other formerly Prior-controlled worlds. They execute the man, conclude that the example will be insufficient to deter others from attempting the same in future, and regretfully raze the planet's surface with a combined salvo from the fleet's primary cannons. They would have simply removed or destroyed the stargate if they could, but as the gate's material is proof against their weapons, that isn't possible until they have recourse to Asgard beaming technology. Some of them feel a twinge of remorse at this commission of genocide, but they all understand the concept of collateral damage, and there is nothing they won't do to make the galaxy safe. The recordings of the event and the aftermath won't hurt to have, either, should other planetary populations prove recalcitrant.

Third on their agenda is to bring the fight to the Ori. For that they must design and construct a Sangreal amplifier -- the weapon they've got is effective against Orici and Priors one-on-one in close quarters, but will have to be modified to work on a galactic scale -- and for that they require the resources of Stargate Command, and Earth.

They drop Mitchell and Carter off on a planet from which they can gate to the SGC. Precisely one hour later, their fleet of forty-two ships drops out of hyperspace around Earth and forms a spherical cordon. No attack is immediately forthcoming from either _Odyssey_ or weapons satellites, which they take as a hopeful sign that Mitchell and Carter have made their position and their needs clear to the Terran authorities.

There really shouldn't be a problem with ensuring cooperation. They've returned the victorious conquerors, having repelled the Ori invasion, and they're offering a permanent solution to what will otherwise remain a persistent threat. Earth should welcome them with open arms.

The entity still known as Daniel Jackson sits alone in the control chair on the lead ship orbiting Earth. This is only one of their several homeworlds, for which they feel no more affection than for any other -- and are no more inclined to spare. On a chain around their neck -- the chain that once held the identification tags they were issued by the Terran military, long since dropped negligently into a pocket -- is the Sangreal. They stroke it speculatively as they await the response of their agents in the SGC.

&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;

"Well, it's official," Mitchell says, banging the last cubby door closed in the last outbuilding in the last sector of the city. "We've been skunked."

Jackson comes in mopping his nose and his running eyes. "There's nothing anywhere around the ex--" His voices hitches up high and he sneezes spectacularly. "--terior," he finishes, folding his soaked, useless handkerchief to mop some more.

"Gesundheit," Teal'c says, with no expression. Nobody laughs.

"YOU HAVE COME TO BE RESTORED?" a voice booms from across the room.

They whirl on it, weapons coming unerringly to bear -- on the figure of a man made of just enough see-through shimmeriness to qualify as a hologram.

It's the first unfamiliar voice they've heard in two months. It's the first sign of life or even computer activity they've seen in this green needle-spired city at all.

"My pardon," the hologram says, in a more reasonable tone. "The volume of my audio interface is now adjusted. It has been some time since I have been activated. I am the curator of the restoratory. Welcome."

"Restore a _tree_?" Mitchell says, picturing environmentalists planting groves in the wake of heavy logging.

"Re-_store_-a-tor-ee," Vala says from the doorway. She's only just lowering her own weapon. She lagged behind Jackson all morning, bored to the point of lethargy by day after day searching for the Ori-zapper, but the earsplitting voice must have galvanized her to take position as backup. "He says it like la-_bore_-a-tree, or _lav_-a-tree. Is that right?"

"You are the one whose vocalizations I analyzed in order to communicate with your party should you enter the restoratory and activate my holographic interface. Again, my pardon."

"No sweat," Mitchell says. He exchanges a look with Jackson, whose eyebrows urge him to keep talking. "So, curator, huh? What is this place?"

"The structure in which you are standing is the restoratory. The city in which it is located is Sangreal. The continent on which the city -- "

"Hold up," Mitchell says. "Rewind. The _name_ of this place is Sangreal?"

"That is correct."

Vala says, in a low voice the curator's analyzer will probably pick up anyway, "Could this whole city be the weapon?"

Mitchell says, "You mean, the way Atlantis is a spaceship?" If it is, how the hell are they going to deploy it? "Then I sure hope it can fly."

"What happened to the city's residents?" Jackson asks the curator, muffled through his handkerchief and the streams of snot. It seems like a non sequitur to Mitchell, but he knows Jackson well enough to let him run with it.

"They were destroyed in an act of genocide, three turns of the greater moon ago, along with the rest of the population of this world."

"The Orici," Mitchell says, pronouncing it as four letters instead of four syllables. She's back at the base camp, with Ba'al and Carter. There were only two sectors left today to search, so only four of them went out.

"Which means this city's probably not the weapon," Jackson says. He turns to the curator, who's waiting with an appearance of patience. "What do you mean by 'restored'?"

"You are of the fallen," the curator says to him. "Your kind come here to regain what the others take from you when they cast you from the heavens."

"You mean ... " Jackson frowns. "You mean what the Ascended take when ... You mean my memory?"

"Your self, of which memory is a portion, yes. Your identity. Some would say your soul."

"Um ... wow." Jackson blinks through his allergy-tears. "OK. Well. That's all this place does?"

"Is that not why you have come? Why you have searched so long?"

"I got my ... self back on my own, thanks. Actually we're looking for a device, a defensive weapon made by an Ancient -- an Alteran -- named Myrddin. Can you tell us where it is?"

"There is no such device here, or anywhere on this world."

"How about a ship?" Mitchell asks, and when the hologram just stares at him, "A spaceship? A vessel for leaving this world and going to other ones?"

"There are no such vessels."

"How about a transport device? A stargate, chappa'ai, big ring forms a stable wormhole to another gate? Or some object, 'bout yea big, we touch it and it sends us somewhere else?" The hologram just keeps shaking its head. "The people on this world weren't capable of interplanetary travel at all?"

"Those born here had no reason to wish to leave. Those restored here were weary of travel and glad to remain. They came understanding that they must stay. Did you receive no instructions? How else did you come here if not by making your passage?"

"I believe we arrived here by way of a ... non-standard route," Teal'c says.

"Yeah, I think we missed out on the whole underground-railroad thing," Mitchell says, starting to cotton on. "Too bad nobody slipped you a card for this place five years ago, huh?" he says to Jackson.

"Yeah, too bad," Jackson says, his uniquely chilling mildness coming across despite the ongoing allergic reactions. His gaze is still fixed on the hologram. "Is this planet hidden from the other Ascended somehow?"

Mitchell gets that the next question will be whether it can defend against incursions of Ascended taking exception to their rejects stealing their memories back.

"No Ascended may enter the restoratory," the curator says.

"So this is a sanctuary -- once a former Ascended makes it this far, they get restored in peace, and after that there's nothing the others can do because that would be interfering."

Mitchell's not sure whether Jackson's forming conclusions out loud, prompting for confirmation from the curator, or explaining to the rest of them; all three, probably. But the curator nods.

"We arrived on this world out in a field several kilometers, miles -- some distance away," Daniel says. "Far enough that we had to walk for half of one of your days to get to the city. Are most ... people transported directly in here?"

"Yes," the curator says.

"How?" Vala asks. "And from where?"

Seems she's still hoping to score a return ticket, probably figuring they just haven't asked the machine the right questions yet. But the hologram replies, "I do not have that information. If I did I would be capable of divulging it."

"What he doesn't know he can't spill," Mitchell translates. "I think he's telling the truth and we're shit outta luck. Oh for two -- no zapper, no ride."

"Is your interface accessible from any other structures in this city?" Teal'c asks the hologram.

"I have been activated. I will respond to you wherever you are, so long as you remain in the city. But you can be restored only here."

Mitchell looks at Jackson, who gives a vague headshake in response. Either he's at a loss, or he needs more time to think.

"Back to the ranch," Mitchell says. "Let's give Carter a shot at interfacing with our friend here, see what she can" -- _wring out of him_ \-- "contribute to the dialogue."

"And Adria?" Vala asks, as they start back through the dusky, green-shadowed streets.

"Dunno yet," Mitchell says, but sixty seconds after they arrive back at base he's got the Orici shoved up against a wall and her airway at the mercy of his forearm and he's saying, "Did you even _know_ that you're why this planet is so deserted?"

"Do you think I make a personal mission of every world we offer salvation?" she chokes out. "We have redeemed hundreds, and hundreds more have fallen because they would not accept Origin. My armies are vast and my Priors are everywhere."

"They're not here," he points out.

"If they had been here they would have left a handful alive to tell the tale," she squeaks, and in her terror of the pressure on her windpipe he reads some truth. "They would have left the corpses as a lesson to others. This was not my doing. Let me go."

He eases off but doesn't release her. "I think you screwed up," he says. "I think Merlin's weapon _is_ on this planet and you just plain missed it. But I sure as hell don't see how you can help us anymore." She's been another pair of feet, another pair of eyes, and they searched in pairs not just for buddy-system backup but so that someone would always be there to watch her in case she found it and tried to destroy it. But their search parameters just expanded planetwide. She's a drop in a bucket now.

In the corner of his eye he can see Ba'al's weight shift to the balls of his feet, and Teal'c's weapon swing around to Ba'al in silent warning.

Mitchell always knew that hand-to-hand killing was a whole nother thing from discharging a firearm at a distance or taking out a target from the air. He didn't know how different until this moment. Visions of Priors wiping out all this city's people press his weight into the long bone of his arm. But she could be telling the truth. There might be some other force at work here. He doesn't know how much more she might know. Crushing her throat won't bring back the dead. And however evil she is, however dangerous, she's still soft and slim and feminine under his assault, and he's still enough of a chauvinist pig to have a problem with that.

He gets a flash of blood, a broken head, a limp body -- that he could do, _that_ he would _love_ to do -- strangulation is barbaric but a quick hard blow with the butt of a --

He shakes it off. He's done enough impulsive things in the past two years, gone off half-cocked too many times. He lets up the pressure and steps back.

"Cam, I think I've got something," Carter says.

Keeping Adria in view, he turns enough to see that Carter's been talking to the curator, which has conjured up a glowing holographic 3D map display over in that corner of the room.

"There's something like an airfield about three hundred kilometers north," she says. "We can get there on the scooters in a few days and transfer to aircraft. There are cities like this one dotted all around the planet. The curator admits that his data was limited by creators who wanted to keep secrets from prying visitors like us. When he says there's no device like the weapon we're looking for, he probably believes it -- but that doesn't mean it's true. We should look for ourselves."

At two months per city? Maybe more, if some of them are bigger? He doesn't even ask how many cities there are; he doesn't want to know, and neither does anybody else, because the only responses are exhausted huffs of air and low groans. And another messy sneeze from Jackson.

"Well, I refuse," Adria says. She sounds hoarse and she's still rubbing her throat. "And I've had quite enough of _you_, Colonel Mitchell."

"Can't drive off in a huff without wheels, honey pie," he says, half of his mind on what Carter's just reported, half of it occupied by the weird flashes that aren't going away.

Adria is smiling sweetly with her softly curved, too-pretty-for-comfort lips, and he can't understand the tinge of victory in it until she says, "Oh, I most assuredly have 'wheels'" -- and he registers the low bone-thrumming vibration in the air and the floor, the high drone of large engines surfacing from subliminal to audible.

"How the hell ... ?" Mitchell says. Is she that fucking _extraordinary_ a liar, her pendant working all this time? She let him _shoot_ her to prove ...

Teal'c zats her, once. A weird twinge goes through Mitchell's gut as he sees her slump to the floor. He flashes again on an image of pooling blood, skull fragments --

"She was broadcasting our location," Teal'c says. He's moved to truss her up with cord pulled from his pack, but he lifts one hand to tap his temple with a forefinger.

"She must have sent a telepathic message to her forces," Jackson says, working it through, translating Teal'c's gesture. "The city would have suppressed any attempt at operant mindreading or telekinesis the same way Morgan's caves did, but it couldn't stop her from thinking something passively informational like 'I'm here and it would be nice if somebody picked me up.' That would amount to suppressing all thought."

"Twenty ships," Carter reports, from where she's been examining displays she had the curator show her. "Eighteen have made a cordon around the planet and two are on a vector to land to either side of the city."

"They will converge on her last known location," Teal'c says, rising.

"Can't hold 'em off here even with a hostage," Mitchell says. "Not two shiploads."

"They won't stop searching until they've found her," Vala says. "It doesn't matter where we hide."

"We can keep her sedated," Carter says, "but only until we run out of drugs."

"We can kill her," Ba'al says, with stating-the-obvious emphasis.

"They might sense that and just level the city," Carter says, and Ba'al says he'll take that chance and produces a knife he must have found and slipped into his boot at some point while they were searching. Vala tackles him as he throws it, and it sticks blade-first in the floor between Teal'c and Mitchell. Ba'al flings Vala away from him; she skids across the floor on her hip but comes to a stop before she cracks her skull on the wall. Mitchell tries to order everyone out onto the scooters -- this location's compromised and they have to get out -- but a syrupy weakness goes through his body, how close her skull came to cracking against that wall, and for a second he can't get his breath.

"There is one place we can go that's safer than here," Jackson says, and turns to the curator. "Does the restoratory only keep out Ascended, or -- "

"It will repel their corporeal minions as well," the curator says. Anticipating -- not as passive as he made out to be, when he hedged with his minimal answers to only the questions they asked.

"Move out," Mitchell says.

They leave the gear, including everything of Carter's except what she keeps in her tac vest and jacket. Teal'c carries Adria and what sedatives Vala could jam into his vest in a hurry. They've just revved up the air scooters when the first wave of Ori soldiers hits.

"Go high," Mitchell calls, and goes low as the other five bank steeply upwards. Weapons fire whines to either side of him as he jiggers the scooter up, down -- a slewing yaw that overloads the gyros and nearly stalls the thing -- then straight into the ranks of ground troops.

They dive and scatter. He clips one guy on the armored shoulder and his scooter wobbles like a weak Hail Mary pass. He muscles it back under control -- it responds to his legs almost like a horse -- and then his whole body jerks as an energy beam grazes his anklebone, and he finds himself flying sideways. That's OK, because another energy beam lances the air where his head was a second ago. But the scooter emits a tinny alarm that makes him easy to locate.

He pulls up on the control-yoke handlebars, which amounts to banking right. He nearly decapitates himself on the nearest building, but ducks in time and just manages to slip between that building and the one across from it. The maneuver gets the alarm sound bouncing confusingly off walls until he can wrench the scooter upright and shut the damn thing up.

The restoratory is maybe a klick away in the rough direction of his seven o'clock. No idea where his team is; they'll be pulling evasive maneuvers of their own. He takes a Pac-Man route through alleys and byways, edging closer to the city periphery. The noose should have closed pretty tight by now. If he can steeplechase over the last rank of soldiers -- if there _is_ a last rank, if they're not effectively an endless wave -- he might be able to come around to the restoratory from the outside. He'll be exposed for maybe a minute. It's a crazy gamble but the only option he has.

He goes high -- way high, sky-high, dancing serpentine around the needle spires of the city, figure-eighting when a spear of blue weapons fire announces he's been spotted. He doesn't know if this thing can be put into a controlled stall -- he doesn't really understand how it flies at all, except that it's something like antigravity, which is close enough to bottom-up propulsion -- but he knows how long it takes to rev up to flight readiness after a shutdown, and he's got a ballpark on his own altitude. It's an equation he can do in his head while he maneuvers. Over a soldier-flooded alley where they have no elbow room, he cuts the engine, and drops like a stone.

The scooter lets out a high-pitched, earsplitting shriek. To military personnel it might parse as the whine of an incoming mortar round as he falls, and it could put the fear of the gods into superstitious brainwashed peasants. This bunch is more of the latter than the former. Some of them duck, some of them dive over the others to get out of his path; with no maneuvering room side-to-side, they end up in an alley-jamming fleshpile.

He plummets toward them. He counts off, feet per second per second, four ... five ... six ...

He gives the handgrips a savage twist and brings the engine back to life. The footrests of the scooter ding a helmet, skid along a cuirass. He pushes down with his toes for more forward power and the front fork catches on an upflung arm and nearly pitches him onto his nose. He throws his legs out to the side, finds purchase, and kicks off a head on the left and a pauldron on the right.

Freed, the scooter surges up and forward. He stays low enough to trim hair, moving faster than they can untangle themselves and rise up into his way, staying down close enough that if they take shots at him they'll risk blowing each other's heads off. Then he's out -- out of the alley, out of the city.

He banks hard left and hugs the curve of outbuildings. The next rank of soldiers is closing from maybe sixty meters. The green scooter will blend into the green color of the building's stone, and the sun's on the other side of the city, putting him in shadow. His BDUs are close enough to green. A few potshots nearly get lucky, but they can't get a bead on him.

He slips into an alleyway maybe twenty meters past where he reckons the restoratory is. It's quiet; he's behind the first rank of soldiers now, in between waves. He pulls a big ubie around the building on his right, stops the scooter, dismounts, then rigs it to fly straight ahead on its own and lets it go. Unless it gets shot down, it'll fly down the long street and right out of the city about a third of the way around the periphery. It'll look like he fell off, and they won't be able to tell where.

Roughly retracing his route in a random pattern, he makes his way on foot back to the restoratory, and slips in the back. The place is windowless, but there's a front door, also barred and with an antechamber beyond it.

His stomach drops when he sees that not everybody else has made it.

"Where's Teal'c?" Mitchell says.

"In the foyer with Adria," Carter says. "She came around when he tried to bring her in here and had a screaming convulsive fit until we sedated her."

_In the foyer with Adria_. It has a funny ring to it that reminds him of something. Some game he used to like when he was a kid. Why is he thinking of that now? He tries to shake it off, and he can't, quite, and that's a little weird. He was OK on the scooter, but before that, and now again, there's something --

"She's a hybrid," Jackson says. "A 'minion' of the Ori with enough Ascendedness in her that this place won't let her inside."

"Anybody hear her holler?" Mitchell says. "Anybody see anybody come in here?"

Three heads shake and Ba'al favors him with a supercilious glare.

"We're secure for now," Carter says. She gestures at a holographic display of the city with little pinpoint lights representing the Ori soldiers. "Judging from their movements, her troops are in some disarray. Without instructions from her they're not sure what to do. They're looking for her around our old base, but they haven't organized into an effective search of the city."

"We must trade her for one of their vessels," Ba'al says.

"I hate to say it," Carter says, "but I agree. I'd settle for a transmitter strong enough to let us call for backup, but no backup we have can beat twenty Ori ships."

"Can one Ori ship beat nineteen other Ori ships?" Vala asks.

"They'd never give us a fully functional ship," Jackson says. "And we wouldn't know it until we tried to escape into hyperspace and couldn't jump."

"They will if we persuade the Orici to order them to," Ba'al says darkly.

"She'll say whatever you force her to say, while she's sending them a different message telepathically," Carter says.

Ba'al cocks his head with a smile and says, almost gently, "Give me one hour with her and an ampoule of stimulants and I assure you that she will forgo even the thought of subterfuge."

Mitchell's stomach does a slow, sick barrel roll at the easy way Ba'al shifts gears between what he's been doing with the girl and what he'll happily do to her now. He shakes his head hard, scrubs at his face. What's wrong with him? Ba'al's a _snake_, what does he expect? But what he feels is half horror and half ... empathy.

And the thing is, he's considering it. It's a reasonable course of action, and the good of the mission has to come first. The blood would be on Ba'al's hands, not theirs, and the Orici is a monster who'd turn around and do the same to any one of them if it suited her purposes. Righteous ethics are a luxury when your back's against this kind of wall. A strong leader makes hard choices, and doing this Ba'al's way will save them having to shoot their way out, mowing down countless Ori soldiers, poor ignorant peasants brainwashed and dragooned into service they don't understand. If someone must pay the price for this mad war, let it be the leader, not the blind, misled followers ...

A wave of lightheadedness makes him stagger. He clutches at protocol: "Carter, update."

"The enemy appears to be abandoning the search as night falls," she says in an oddly flat voice. "Eighty percent have been picked up by their vessels while the other twenty percent remain stationary on the surface, most likely making camp as night falls, posted as sentries in and around the city."

"Did they leave any ships on the ground?"

"Negative," Carter says -- if possible, even more tonelessly. She's looking at the holographic display, her back to him, fists planted on her hips, feet shoulder-width apart. That strikes him as more odd than the odd tone of voice. "I too weighed the option of attempting to reach one of their vessels under cover of darkness and take control of it. That will not be possible."

"Of course it's possible," Vala says. "We will capture five or six of their footsoldiers and initiate the transport protocol. Ride piggyback if we have to. Once we have boarded their vessel it will be a trivial matter to gain control."

Mitchell's really not feeling so good; leaning against the wall isn't cutting it anymore, and he sinks down cross-legged, but that's not enough either and he uncrosses his legs and spreads them so he can put his head down between his knees before he passes out. There must be a Prior ... there must be a bug, some kind of infection, it would be a far more efficient way to root them out, make them all sick and then if they're holding the Orici, which somebody must have figured out that they are, she'll be able to escape ... except if they think she's the child of all-powerful gods why wouldn't they assume she could escape by herself? ... they're just waiting for orders out there, that's all, they're helpless without direction, and that means there's no Prior ...

He can't think straight. He's pretty sure he's going to puke.

From the sound of Carter's voice, she's turned around. "We have no idea what their transport protocol is."

"The Orici knows," Vala says. Her voice moves away from Mitchell, goes silky smooth: "And I know just the System Lord to pluck the knowledge from her."

"No," Ba'al's voice says -- and that jerks Mitchell's spinning head up, because he's never heard _terror_ in that voice before, he's never heard _pleading_ ...

Ba'al has shrunk back against his wall, away from Vala's stalking approach. "I am no System Lord," he says. "I am no torturer. I am no god. ... I could not harm that poor, pretty child. Do not ask that of me ... "

Vala stops and regards him with her head cocked in a way that looks as unpleasantly familiar as it looks un-Vala-like. She's yanked the elastics from her pigtails; she shakes her hair back and says, "Fascinating ... "

"Who are you?" Carter says to Ba'al, in a deep, commanding voice that's nothing like Carter's usual command voice.

He shrinks back farther against his wall and shakes his head, eyes darting wildly between her and Vala. "I do not know ... I do not ... remember ... "

"It's his bloody host," Vala says. She takes two strides forward to fork Ba'al's throat between thumb and fingers. "Back down into your hole, little host ... we have need of your master now ... "

"Have mercy," he says, in a terrorized half-airless squeal, "I beg you -- " Then he snarls low in his throat and lunges off the wall, flinging Vala away from him. She catches her balance easily and laughs as if they've discovered a delightful game. "You overstep yourself," he says, eyes on demonic highbeams, voice at full distortion. "You are not who you believe yourself to be."

"Perhaps she is not," Carter's voice says from Mitchell's right as his thoughts fall into a weak, sick repetition of _what the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck_. "But I am."

Two short, half-defeaning bursts of semiautomatic weapons fire send Vala springing off to the side and smash Ba'al back against the wall. He slides down onto his butt in a smear of blood that proceeds to bubble and smoke, like acid burning into the alien stone, etching the history of his slow, stunned fall.

"I am Jolinar of Malkshur," Carter says, "and it is long past time for you to die, System Lord."

_My name is Inigo Montoya_. Mitchell leans forward and vomits a stream of green liquid between his own feet. _You killed my father. Prepare to die_. With all due respect to General O'Neill, he's always been more of a _Princess Bride_ man.

"You fool," Vala spits. "My expertise is killing. His is interrogation. We need that."

Ba'al is making an effort to talk, but one of the bullets punctured a lung or his windpipe; all that comes out is a wheeze. His symbiote will be useless if his body suffocates before it can heal the damage. But the Tok'ra that Carter's hallucinating herself to be must have wanted him to die slowly enough to suffer, or she'd just have blown his head off.

She's moving now to crouch down by him. For a second, god help him, he thinks she reaching in to rip his heart out. But she's sticking fingers into the holes in his chest. He groans audibly; she's plugged the leak. The sight of it sends Mitchell into a paroxysm of dry heaves. He doesn't understand; he's seen much, much worse than this, he's never been squeamish, and he's not half as dizzy as he was five minutes ago. But his gorge keeps rising; the nausea keeps him from struggling to his feet, trying to step in, restore control. He tries to reach for his radio to call Teal'c, and he can't get his arm up. He rolls his head, looking for Jackson, and spots him sitting in a far corner -- butt on the floor, back cradled by the walls, knees drawn up, watching the proceedings with no interest or no comprehension. That makes a trio of them -- him, Ba'al, and Jackson -- equidistant around the room, unable to do anything, while Carter and Vala play out some consensual delusion he can't begin to understand.

"Tell me the code," Carter says, in that deep, authoritative voice that isn't hers.

"Used ... " Ba'al's voice responds -- managing raking scorn through a froth of blood. "Cave ... "

"Then there is another," Carter says. "One that will disable this protector as the absurdity in the cave disabled the other."

She wants to disable the curator hologram? It's their only source of information -- it might control the protective capabilities of this sanctuary, it might be what'll keep the Ascended and their soldiers out --

"It is far too late for that," the curator's voice says. "The reconstitution is nearly complete. Only the blending remains, and if you do not permit it to proceed you will most certainly go mad."

_This isn't supposed to happen to us_, Mitchell thinks, as the AI's words register and he gets a glimmering of what's been wrong with him since they found this place and going wronger all the time. _We're a bunch of ordinary joes._ A wave of absolute terror washes over him, as debilitating in its way as the dizziness and the nausea were: _fuck no, fuck no, not me, not them_ ...

"Tell me your name," Carter commands the dying man she's shoved her fingers into.

"Lord Ba'al," he says, lips stretched back from his teeth in a feral snarl of agony and rage. "I am the Lord Ba'al your god ... "

Carter's left hand grips his face, squeezes until it goes white around her fingers. "Tell me your name," she commands again. _"Remember."_

"I was ... Elguz," he rasps, in a very different voice. "I am Elguz ... of Ras Shamra ... "

"Tell me the code, Elguz."

"I do not ... remember ... "

"Tell me the code and I will end your millennia of suffering. Tell me the code, Elguz of Ras Shamra, and the pain will stop, forever."

"He will not ... permit ... "

A weak glow flares and dies in the terrified dark eyes. The face contorts in a grotesque war of expressions. Ba'al's hand twitches, moves -- not Ba'al's anymore, but controlled for the first time in thousands of years by its original owner. A fingertip trails through the pooling blood, painstakingly inscribes what might be some kind of symbols on the nearest clear stretch of floor. They hiss into the stone as the blood reacts with it.

Elguz's hand jerks spastically and then flops limp. He whines, his pleading eyes rolling toward Carter.

She unholsters her sidearm and puts a bullet through his head.

Vala has crept up behind her. She sweeps her foot out now, through the smoking puddle of blood subsiding into the floor, and over whatever Ba'al's finger just wrote beside it. "I'm rather enjoying this situation we find ourselves in," she says. "I remember this body quite fondly. I think I'll keep it if it's all the same to you."

Carter, unperturbed, pushes up to her feet and turns to the hologram that calls itself the curator. "_Kharesh nuvael_," she says to it. "You will now answer to my commands."

"As you wish," it replies, and bows.

"That's not what he wrote," Vala says, as if offended by unfair trickery.

"What he wrote was a cipher," says a voice that comes from Carter's mouth but doesn't sound like either Carter's or Jolinar's. "The nonsense word he said to the dragon was a code for the code. I saw the cipher before you rubbed it out and I decoded the command in my head."

"How very clever of you," Vala says speculatively, in her very not-Vala voice.

"It is my honor to serve," Carter replies, half as though she's reciting something by rote, half sincerely.

"You may accrue further honor by serving me," Vala says, coming around in front of her, peering at her intently. "Tell this avatar that the restoratory must complete its function."

Carter gives a "yes, ma'am" bow of the head and relays the order to the curator. Then she sways, staggers -- Vala steps back warily -- and says, "No. Belay that. Wait -- "

"It is too late," the curator says, "and it is not in my power to circumvent the reconstitution and blending in any event. You carried more than you knew. Had you carried only yourselves, no change would have occurred. Not all arrive aware that they require restoration. The process initiates upon entrance."

_But he asked us,_ Mitchell thinks. _When we came in, he asked -- _

"The rite of inquiry is a formality that helps to orient the fallen," the curator said, appearing to look right at him. "The answers make no difference; the query-and-response merely soothes and prepares."

"You son of a bitch," Carter breathes. Then her shoulders come back, her spine straightens, and in her Jolinar of Malkshur voice she says, "Explain the process. Briefly -- do not attempt to extend the explanation to distract us through its completion."

"The fallen enter the restoratory. They are scanned at once. Their minds are modeled. Previous states are analyzed and reconstituted. Where only fragments remain, a whole is extrapolated from the part or parts. All are blended, and the restoration is complete."

"Define 'previous states.'"

"All the selves you have ever been as you developed throughout your lifetime. All must be blended for the personality to achieve the dimension required for a full restoration."

"What is this _rubbish_?" Vala says, and the word brings Mitchell's nausea back in spades, because he knows who she "is" now, he knows who's been controlling that body since her behavior changed, and he knows that the entity Qetesh drew its vocabulary and mannerisms as much from Vala as from all its previous hosts. The recursiveness makes him sick and dizzy, because _it's happening in his head too_, and because they haven't seen a single sign of Vala since this started, even though Carter surfaced once and some other personality he couldn't identify, and he's thinking that they may never see Vala again, and that means that any moment he could go under too. The flashes of blood, the stove-in skull, the murderous anguish ... the austere determination to put the project first at all costs ...

_Dad was an asshole and Mom was a whackjob and look what happened to me,_ he thinks. Then --

"No," he groans out, grates out as he forces himself to his feet in a titanic effort of will. He's used to fighting his broken body, forcing it to do what he tells it to. He's not so used to fighting his broken head, but it can't be that different. It just takes grit. Grit, he's got. "Stop the process. Stop it. That's an order. _Kharesh nuvael_. Obey me. Stop the process."

"It is too late," the curator insists.

"Horseshit. Stop the fucking process!"

"You will go mad -- all of you -- if the blending is not finalized -- "

Mitchell reaches into his vest, turns to the wall, and slams a wad of C4 smack in the middle of it. "Where's your circuitry, huh?" he says, pressing the detonator in, then moves six feet over to slap another wad of explosive down lower, by the floor. "How much of this building do I have to slag to blow your brains out?"

"Cease these actions, please!"

"Cease the motherfucking process!"

The lights flicker -- go off and then come back on at half intensity.

"It is done," the curator says.

There's a pause then, the kind of stillness that comes right before an explosion.

"The ... blending, or the stopping?" Mitchell says. He's trying to examine his own skull from the inside, palpate his brain, figure out how much of him is still him.

"I have suspended the process, as you requested," the curator says.

"God," Carter says, gripping her head. "Oh my _god_."

Vala sinks to her knees. "Not again," she says. "I can't. Not again."

"Then fight it," Mitchell says. "You're stronger than the ghost of that snake, Vala. You are a _galactic_ pain in the ass. _Fight it_."

Carter's pulled herself maybe halfway together. She pushes up from where she was bent over leaning on her knees and says, "It's like data on a hard disk. Even after reformatting, overwriting, a forensic technician can still pull the data -- "

"Jesus," Mitchell says, "_Jesus!_" -- bellowed as he's diving across the room, a bursting step into a headlong base-stealing dive towards Jackson. Jackson, who's been sitting still and silent and forgotten in his corner.

He's positioned the Beretta, barrel jammed up against the palate to absorb the recoil, but he hasn't gotten his thumbs through the trigger guard yet. That's what saves him; that's why Mitchell reaches him before he can fire, why the weapon doesn't discharge as Mitchell slaps the grip aside and take half the guy's head off anyway, at worst put a hole through his cheek and leave him with a mouthful of blood and paraffin.

They wind up in a messy tangle, but Jackson's not fighting. Mitchell doesn't have to wrestle the pistol away from him; he gives it up and lies slumped against the wall. Pupils reactive, eyes tracking; just no interest. Not so much as a grunt of protest, forget an explanation.

"Hey," Mitchell says, and kneels up in front of him to pat both cheeks, brisk wake-up slaps. "_Hey_. C'mon, Jackson. The curator stopped the process. We'll figure out how to reverse it. It's not like you ever had a _snake_ in there, for chrissakes. Snap out of it. Get with the ... program ... "

As he says the last word, he can _feel_ it: the Emissary rising from the depths of his mind, the chill of icy certainty that he knows what's best and under his authority they'll sort this out, underneath it the pyroclastic fire of his will to survive.

"No," he says, grabbing his own head. Stupid reflex, but he can't help it, the impulse to squeeze the thing out of him. _Get it out of me, get it out, get it out_ \--

Tea'l'c's voice crackles over the radio. "Colonel Mitchell, acknowledge."

He gets a mental grip on himself, looks down at Jackson. Before he reaches for the radio, he pulls a set of plastic wrist ties from his tac vest and cinches Jackson's hands in front of him. He could still do himself all kinds of harm -- bash his own head on the wall, blood everywhere, white flecks of shattered skull, _shut up Marell shut the fuck up_ \-- but it'll help, maybe, some.

He knees back and pushes the radio up toward his mouth. "Yeah, Teal'c."

"There are approximately two platoons of Ori soldiers approaching this position."

"They know we're here?"

"They do not appear to be converging on this precise location; however, their large numbers are suspicious. These are not scouting parties."

"Orici's still out?"

"She remains unconscious, but there is rapid-eye movement. It is possible that she can call to them even in her dreams."

"Fuck," Mitchell says softly, without thumbing it through the radio. He gives Jackson a shake as he pushes off to get up. "Come _on_, Jackson. Pull it together. You're you. You're fine." He resists a strong urge to give him a kick. That's not him. Who the fuck is that, the Emissary? _Lay off, asswipe. My body._ Vala is pushing past him to take Jackson's knife away -- should he let her take the thing, should he disarm them all? -- and try to bring him around. Through the radio, he says, "Report acknowledged. Stand by."

He stares for a few seconds at the P90 slung across Vala's back, under Qetesh's mane of hair. He's OK so far. He's under control. The process was halted. He's got to trust that they'll keep control now too.

He turns to Carter, who's leaning on one arm against the wall. "Colonel? You in there?"

She lifts her head to give a shaky nod, but it doesn't look good. Bruised crescents shadow her eyes, and she's way too pale, with beads of sweat on her upper lip. "I think she's letting me have control. The same as she would if she were physically in my body. But she'll take the stick back if she decides to. Thera's not helping."

The name rings a faraway bell. Oh, yeah -- the fake identity she had stamped on her brain when SG-1 was disappeared into the underground power station on the ice-age planet. If he can remember that small a detail from a mission report he read eighteen months ago, he's gotta be himself, right? "She wants to live?" he guesses, based on what he's sensing from the personalities the restoratory constructed from traces of the smallest memory fragments in his own head. "She's got a real identity now and she wants to keep it?"

"No," Carter says. He's never heard her sound so bleak. "She wants to serve."

"Make her serve you," Mitchell says -- a lot more curt than he meant to be, but it wasn't him that time, was it. It was the Emissary. "You're fine, Sam. You're in control. You keep control. We'll get this shit out of our heads and then -- "

"The restoration cannot be reversed," the curator says.

Jackson's voice comes from across the room, more bleak than Carter's: "Pour two glasses of water together, you can never put the water molecules back into the glasses they came from exactly the way they were."

Mitchell's stomach does another loop-the-loop as he recalls that mission report too. No one was ever able to separate the personalities from the _Stromos_ to get them out of that guy's head and put them back in their storage matrices. If it was possible to separate them from Jackson it should have been possible to separate them from each other. But nobody figured out how before the guy died. And there were a dozen different personalities stored in Jackson's head. If every one of them left enough traces for the restoratory to reconstitute --

Christ. No wonder he tried to blow his brains out.

" ... urge you to let the restoratory complete the process," the curator's saying. "You will cease to be at war within yourselves, then, and you -- "

Mitchell's head whips around at the sharp report of weapons fire from the adjoining building. "Hold position," he says to Carter and Vala, and then he barks "Teal'c, report!" into the radio.

The weapons fire continues, the whine of energy weapons weaving around the staccato bursts of semiautomatic rounds. Then the P90 cuts out, and for a gut-clenching moment there's only the whine of the Ori weapons.

Finally the radio crackles. "I led them to believe that we are hiding next door. They are preparing to storm the premises. I will now attempt to retreat back to the restoratory antechamber. I left the Orici just outside your front door. She was not convulsing as she did earlier at that proximity to the interior. I believe the defenses the curator promised have failed."

"Not failed," the curator says. "Shut down. It was the only way to halt the process."

Great. Just. Great.

They can let it finish the job it started on their heads, or they can wait for the Ori troops to come in and finish _them_.

_Wake her up_, the Emissary says. _Order him to revive her and force her to command her troops to withdraw. If the pain is great enough it will fill her mind and she will be incapable of telepathic communication._

_Kill her_, Doctor Marell says. _A quick blow to the skull ... we've done it before ..._

To the voices in his own head, talking like a crazy man, Mitchell says, "You know, I can't have this fucking conversation right now." Into the radio he says, "Acknowledged, proceed."

"Papyrus or parchment on which earlier writing has been erased but is still legible under more recent writing," Jackson says -- almost apologetically, as though they've been waiting for him to continue a lecture and he's been rudely lost in thought. "Or, sometimes, the erased writing itself." He looks up. "The traces of thoughts left behind. Layers of drafts beneath the surface statement. Impossible to eradicate entirely without destroying the medium."

_Re-store-a-tree_, Mitchell thinks, and now he's picturing reams of paper swirling together, merging and coalescing into the form of a tree, an ink-dappled white paper-tree, all the words on the all the pages blending into a new story.

He shakes it off. "Yeah and I can rub a pencil over the sheet under the one you tore off the memo pad and find out exactly what you wrote," he snaps. "The next analogy I hear, I want it to include _a solution for the problem_."

He's blustering. He's become part of the problem.

Vala's on her feet and striding towards the front door. Carter catches her before she reaches it, spins her around, slams her up against it.

"Unhand me, Tok'ra," Vala snarls, her dark eyes flashing. "She should have ripped the thing from her belly and crushed it when it was a fetus, but I can rectify that error."

"The Orici is more useful to us now as a hostage."

Carter's unclipped the strap from Vala's P90 and now she's groping for sidearm and knife. Vala blocks her hard, a wincing crack of wrist on wrist, and then they're grappling. It looks so much like rough sex that it seems almost natural when Vala wrenches Carter around and pushes her up against the wall, thigh working between her legs, mouth clamped over hers and tongue thrusting deep.

Mitchell's halfway across the room with the intent of breaking it up when he goes weak through the knees -- this was such an intense fantasy of the Emissary's that seeing it happen live, before his eyes, when he's half overwhelmed by the newness of physical sensation anyway, nearly cripples him with arousal. Marell's laughing, close to hysterical, torn between hilarity at the soldier neutralized by an erection and wild frustration at being prevented from grabbing the women one by one himself and --

"Colonel Mitchell," Teal'c's voice says through the radio. "They are coming."

"Fuck this shit," Mitchell says. "_Fuck_ this shit." He closes the distance, hauls the Goa'uld off the Tok'ra by the scruff of the neck, stuns her with a hard knee to the groin, and relieves her of her remaining weapons. As he hands them to the Tok'ra, who's finished spitting off to the side and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, he says, "Do _not_ kill her while I'm gone, and do not let either of them fuck this up." Then he steps to the front door, unbars it, and pulls it open.

Adria's lying unconscious across the threshold; Teal'c's just beyond her, sighting over a barricade of waiting-room chairs and side tables. Mitchell muscles Adria upright and holds her in front of him with a left-arm chokehold. His right hand slips his knife out and presses the point up against the soft flesh just under her ear. Knife to the throat is more viscerally horrifying than a firearm to the head. He steps around Teal'c and Teal'c's barricade just as the outer door is flung open and three soldiers rush in.

"Give us a ship or the Orici dies," he says.

Goggle-eyed, they hesitate, and then one with sigils on his armor that must denote some kind of rank says, "She is Orici. She cannot be killed."

"Yeah?" Mitchell says. "I'll bet ten seconds ago you'd have said 'She is Orici, she cannot be knocked unconscious,' and what we have right here, boys, is one damned unconscious Orici." He strokes the knifepoint down, drawing enough blood for them to see. "Looks pretty flesh-and-blood to me."

The grunts are pressing their palms to their temples as if something's giving them a hell of a headache, and for a moment Mitchell thinks the restoratory's doing its thing on them too, even though it's supposedly turned off and it supposedly doesn't work out here in the anteroom anyway. Then one of them says, "Sir ... she wants us to ... "

"Silence!" the officer snaps, but Mitchell's gotten the point -- Adria's still broadcasting even from unconsciousness, and still receiving enough from them to know what's happening, and she's telling them to move on the unbelievers even if it's at the cost of her own life.

The officer raises his weapon -- and then sags, hands trembling. He can't bring himself to do it. Mitchell can almost feel the pressure of Teal'c's finger ease off the trigger. He opens his mouth to repeat his demand for a ship.

The mass of soldiers parts like the Biblical waters as a Prior strides through their ranks. He plants his staff on the green stone floor, raises his chalky face as if he's addressing something hovering over Mitchell's head, and says, "It is still within your power to accept the truth of Origin and end this futile standoff."

"Hey, it's _well_ within _your_ power to give us a ship and save your Orici's life," Mitchell says.

"If it is the will of the Ori that she be sacrificed, then it is the will of the Ori," the Prior says. "Their advent is imminent even now, through the new portal your forces were helpless to prevent us building to prepare the way for them. She has served her purpose, and they can make another." He lifts his staff, points it, and blasts the barricade into cinders. "Hallowed are the Ori ... "

"Hallowed are the Ori!" the soldiers respond in unison, as Teal'c and Mitchell close ranks and start to back towards the inner door, Adria still held in front of them --

The Prior blasts the Orici dead center.

It sends the three of them flying backwards into the inner room. Mitchell tucks his chin and exhales as he crashes down and goes skidding along on his back with Adria's full weight on top of him; it keeps his skull from cracking on the floor and the wind from being knocked out of him, and before friction has even started to slow him, he's shouting, "Curator, _turn it back on!_"

He hears Teal'c hit the back wall of the room. He sees Qetesh with Vala's P90 back in her hands, raking the doorway in prolonged bursts, Jolinar beside her doing the same with Carter's weapon. He sees Jackson come staggering from his corner, probably with some idea of shutting and barring the door. He sees the Prior's staff glow again, and he sees Ori soldiers shouldering in to fill the antechamber, stepping on and over the bullet-ridden soldiers. He sees the staff fire.

Its energy bursts like a water balloon against a rippling ruby barrier that fades into invisibility as the energy dissipates. Soldiers rush the door, and each impact on the barrier makes a glowing flare of red that dies away as the soldier bounces back. Then the view is cut off as the door crashes shut. Jackson thrusts the bar through its brackets and steps away.

"Why is there even a physical bar for this door at all?" he says, in a vague tone. Then he sinks to his knees.

It comes slowly through to Mitchell that Adria, still lying on top of him where his body cushioned her fall, isn't the dead weight he subconsciously thinks she should be. She took the full brunt of the Prior's staff blast, but she's breathing. He presses his fingers into her neck just below the cut he made, and finds a pulse. As he's rolling her off him, she starts to scream, high-pitched bursts of breath and voice with no conscious awareness in them.

He'd just as soon bash her brains out on the floor to make it stop, but Jackson's shouldering out of his jacket and kneeing over to fold it up under her head. When the convulsions start again, it's all Mitchell can do to hold her down by the arms and legs. Between the staff blast and the restoratory's defenses going up it's really pretty damn amazing that she isn't dead. Until he takes stock, he can't be sure there isn't still some crazy way they can use her to negotiate. He just holds her down while he tries to clear his head.

"There's Ascendedness in the fallen, too," Carter or Jolinar or Thera says, coming to stand over them and look down at Adria. "The restoratory can't attack Ascendedness inside itself without harming those it was created to help. She fell inside this room before the barrier went up, and so she lives. But in the same agony it caused her when she lay just outside, because she is something far closer to an Ascended being than to a former Ascended. The restoratory may not in fact know _what_ to do with her. Nothing like her has ever existed before that we know of."

He can't figure out which one of them that was -- it was patented Carter technomonologue but delivered with a mixture of Jolinar's flat pragmatism and Thera's need to make sense of what she sees. He doesn't care which one it was; all three are equally useful to him, unlike the other woman, in whom Vala is less predictable but easier to manipulate emotionally and Qetesh is predictably self-interested but more difficult to take charge of. He knows that it may not be any one of them at all anymore, but all three, as the engrammatic encoding process completes and the disparate personalities are integrated. He knows that two of those observations aren't his, but he doesn't know which two.

He begins to understand that cumulatively they are all his.

"We're no better off than we were before," Vala or Qetesh is saying, pacing the room. "They will simply wait us out. Starve us out, unless the curator can make one of those fancy food dispensers magically appear in one of these walls."

"We cannot keep the Orici sedated indefinitely," Teal'c says. "Eventually either we must kill her or she will return to consciousness and telepathically command her Prior and her troops to search the rest of the planet for the Sangreal."

"If she hasn't done that already," Carter or Jolinar or Thera points out.

"They will then be free to locate the weapon while they hold us pinned down in here," Teal'c finishes.

And all while the Ori are preparing to come through the new supergate the Priors built for them while SG-1 wasn't around to stop them and who knows what the SGC was doing, if they even knew about it.

"Jackson," Mitchell says. "You back with us, buddy? In some form or other? I could use some fresh ideas here."

Jackson turns, on his knees, at the sound of his name. That's got to be a good sign -- that it's still a name he responds to. Mitchell and Marell and the Emissary look up at him hopefully, together -- with the distinct sense of three discrete bodies occupying the space of one and moving in unison. Jackson blinks at them a couple of times, opens his mouth to answer --

\-- and doubles over violently, racked by something between a massive sneeze and projectile vomiting, as a huge gob of blood flies out of his nose.

It splats on the green not-stone floor. It doesn't bubble or seethe like the Goa'uld's blood. It _rises_, like dough, like embossing -- rises and pulls the substance of the floor into itself, blending with it, congealing and rounding and smoothing.

Jackson sits back on his heels and says, "Wow. _That_ cleared my sinuses."

The rest of them are staring at the teardrop-shaped object on the floor. It's no longer part of the floor; it's sitting on the surface of the floor. It's gone ruby red, translucent, like a gemstone; it almost seems to glow with its own light, or power.

No one even dares whisper it, but they must all be thinking it: _The Sangreal_.

Vala steps in and snatches it up. Jackson is still dazed and reaches too slowly to stop her. Adria is still screaming in her sleep, an eerie sight and an incessant and intensely irritating sound. Mitchell has eased his grip and shifted off to sit beside her, because the convulsions have subsided -- or concentrated -- into something more like paralytic tremors.

"Dammit, put that thing down," Mitchell snaps, as Vala tosses the stone up in the air and catches it, a fearsome grin on her face as though she's just thieved the greatest treasure imaginable. He rolls to his feet to take it away from her -- and she drops, and slams it against Adria's breastbone.

The Ori pendant explodes first. Vala yells and pulls back, which saves her arm from immolation as Adria's body bursts into flames. Just at the last Mitchell is sure he sees her eyes fly open -- he's reeling back from the searing heat himself. Her scream rockets up into an earsplitting shriek, then cuts off.

There's nothing, not even a scorch mark, left on the floor where she was lying. Just the Sangreal, undamaged, serenely glowing.

"A bloodstone," Jackson says, staring at it. "Sometimes also characterized as an emerald that came out of Lucifer's crown -- Lucifer's head -- when he fell from heaven. Probably some confusion with the emerald appearance of the stone-like green substance this city is made from ... "

"She was your _child_," Carter says, spinning Vala around, and Vala throws a vicious punch that Carter barely blocks and says, as they lock arm-on-arm, "That was no child of mine." They push apart, stand glaring at each other, breathing hard. Then Vala produces an ingratiating, placating smile. "Even if she was, she had far too much power to be good for her, and they clearly weren't going to trade for her anyway. We had to find out if the stone works."

"That's the Sangreal," Mitchell says to Jackson, ignoring the faux Goa'uld and the resurrected Tok'ra. "_You made the Sangreal_."

"_A_ Sangreal," Jackson says -- but the rest of them immediately try smearing some of their own blood on the floor, and Mitchell's just lies there, and so does Teal'c's, and Carter's and Vala's does a sort of half-assed version of the acidic bubbling thing Ba'al's did, which means it's probably something to do with naquadah content, not that that matters much right now ... and the drop of fresh blood Jackson squeezes from a pricked fingertip just lies there too.

"The restoration of the fallen is complete," says a warm contralto voice. "A Sangreal is formed only in the moment of completion, and only from the blood of one of the fallen. Please do not drain yourselves dry in an attempt to make another."

They look over to find that the curator, whose holographic form had previously given the appearance of an unassuming, fairly nondescript dark-skinned male in beige-colored robes, has become a pale, brown-haired, brown-eyed woman in rich white silk robes against which a ruby pendant lies prominently over her breast.

"You are the Ancient who called herself Morgan le Fay when she communicated with us through the Atlantis database," Vala says.

"Only her form, and as much of her mind as could be contained in this artificial-intelligence matrix," the hologram says.

"You're wearing a Sangreal," Jackson says, rising to his feet. The Emissary found him a bookish sort, easily dismissed, and Marell had almost no dealings with him at all, and Mitchell forgets sometimes how imposing that six feet of buff frame can be, so they're all a little surprised. They know they're still not thinking clearly. _Random neural firing may continue to occur as the brain acclimates to the integration,_ Mitchell thinks, and it feels just like him thinking it, even though he knows damn well that's Marell and not him. Jackson continues, "The hologram of Merlin that communicated with us in Glastonbury was wearing a Sangreal too. Were you both at some point obliged to use this place to reclaim your memories?"

"Of course," Morgan says. "No one defies the Others for as long as we have and in as many ways as we have without being cast from their ranks just as you were. I am gratified to hear that I communicated with you in the city of Atlantis; it means you have found that place, and that I still exist and still oppose the Others as I can."

"But Merlin made this place," Jackson says. "This place is where Sangreals are made, and the Sangreal is Merlin's weapon."

"Correct," Morgan replies. "I was the first to be restored here, after I was cast down to powerlessness for developing sympathy for the dangerous rebel I was charged with supervising. Hundreds of years and countless other restorations later, Merlin himself found his way here and was restored."

"Where is the Sangreal he made?"

"On a chain around his neck, if he still lives. Gone back to inert stone if he does not. The Sangreal is alive. It dies when its maker dies."

Jackson gives a very, very strange smile. "Guess you guys better keep me around for a while then, huh," he says. Then he leans down, scoops up the Sangreal, and walks to the front door. "Unbar this for me, please," he says, to no one in particular. Fully expecting someone to come do it. "And get these ... bracelets off me."

Carter -- probably Thera -- does.

Jackson walks out with the Sangreal in his hand. The Prior is still there, with a small cadre of soldiers, and through the exterior entrance Mitchell can see ranks of Ori soldiers standing by. The Prior fires at Jackson and the barrier absorbs it. Jackson walks right up to the barrier -- Mitchell's sure he's going to walk through it, try to walk right up and shove the thing down the Prior's throat, and he's going to get himself killed, the Prior will blast him to hell before he's taken two steps. But Jackson stops just on this side of the barrier. He seems to consider for a second. Then he says, "Here. Catch."

He tosses the Sangreal at the Prior. There's enough human reflex left in the man that he actually catches the thing -- one-handed, the other still clutching his staff as though he thought the toss was a trick to make him release it. There's enough force behind the throw that it would have hit him in the face if he didn't catch it. It turns out not to matter whether it hit him in the palm or between the eyes. He bursts into flames, and his staff too, even the glowy power-ball thing at its top. He dies with a shriek just like Adria's. But it doesn't seem like death. It's annihilation. Two eyeblinks, and he's just gone, as if he never existed.

The Sangreal drops to the floor.

So do the soldiers.

"You're under my command now," Jackson says, in a perfectly ordinary, conversational voice. "I destroyed this Prior, and I destroyed the Orici. I have the power to destroy the Ori themselves, which means that they misrepresented themselves to you as being all-powerful. Everything they told you about the truth of Origin was a lie. Will you continue to worship them?"

It seems like he's giving them a choice, even though he's just told them he's in charge now. Mitchell can't help admiring that a little bit even as he feels the start of a very deep chill creeping down through his gut into his bowels.

Who _is_ in Jackson's head now? _What has the restoratory turned him into?_

A bunch of ship's passengers and crew. It can't be that bad. Jackson's fully capable of handling the arrogant sovereign; there's no way that guy will get control of the whole thing, not judging from what Mitchell remembers from the report. There was one stand-up guy, some brave and responsible member of the _Stromos_ crew; there was a little kid, there was a woman ... Mitchell can't remember who else, and he doesn't know if they even knew at the time to include it in the report. Nine or ten other people? Ordinary people. Jackson's an extraordinary guy. He'll maintain control.

He's got to have one of those glacier-planet power-station guys same as Carter, but that shouldn't be a problem either -- those personalities were all about serving and obeying and toeing the line.

That's it, right? That's all they've got to worry about. If they can keep Jolinar and Qetesh from killing each other, convince them to work together as long as they share a common cause ... if Jackson can dominate the alien entities blended into his mind without losing his shit or letting any of them take the wheel ... if they can just hold it together long enough to deploy this Sangreal, then they can come back here and open this machine up and put it back together inside-out so it works in reverse. There's always a way. There'll be a way this time.

He's not going to think about the part of him that would do just about anything, now, to keep things just the way they are. Or the part of him that would rather die than live with the memories of killing his wife and the urges to do it again and again until the pain stops. They're understandable and they're manageable. He's had plenty of urges he never acted on. He's still him. He feels like the same person he's always been. The mission comes first.

If there's a part of him that would find it a relief to defer to Doctor Jackson's experience and authority rather than take charge as he is officially mandated and constitutionally most fit to do, he can be patient with that. He can work with that. He can bide his time. He's done it before.

Teal'c continues to appear unaffected by the restoratory, perhaps something to do with the tretonin he takes to compensate for his lack of a symbiote; he brutally rationed his doses and had just reached the end of his supply when they found this place. While Carter-Jolinar-Thera continues to confer with the Morgan le Fay hologram, Teal'c goes out to the anteroom to lend his military support and intimidating presence to Jackson-et-alia, but it is unnecessary. The soldiers are putty in Jackson's hands. All the fight has gone out of them; they're perfectly malleable and will do anything they're told. Like any peasantry, they're relieved to have someone giving them orders.

Vala-Qetesh slides up beside him -- them -- Mitchell -- Mitchell-Marell-Rulavo -- _us_ \-- _we_ \-- _**me**_. She slides a hand up his arm, to his neck, combs nails down through the shave of hair at his nape. Gooseflesh rises all over his body, a thrill of taboo mixed with exquisite revulsion and desire. He does so savor the challenge of a strong, brilliant woman ... he's ravenous for the pleasure of a woman he can take with impunity and then kill without guilt ... he's got other things on his mind and he's never been interested in Vala, not that way, but hell, this isn't Vala, is it, not really, not anymore, and if she still has that skimpy black leather number lying around her quarters back at the SGC ...

"You do know how this has to end, darling," she murmurs into his ear, a penetration of breath, an insinuation of heat, standing on tiptoe to reach ... so charming that such power can be contained in such a slim, almost delicate frame ... women are so fragile and yet so insidious in their capacity to wound ... "They will pretend to be in charge of the salvation of the galaxy, and we will let them do all the hard work, we will let them develop the infrastructure we will need, and then we will initiate an uprising against their dictatorial rule, and the grateful billions will pledge their hearts to us as their liberators ... "

By 'they' he supposes she means Jackson-et-alia and Carter-Jolinar-Thera. Because their root selves were members of the original SG-1 team, there has always been a sense that they were truly the ones in charge, with the Jaffa serving as their loyal guardian -- that Mitchell's leadership was always nominal and Vala's inclusion on sufferance. One track in his mind has been thinking along the same lines, and though he has no intention of sharing power with this fundamentally piratical onetime overlord, it can certainly do no harm to play along. Especially if there are fringe benefits ...

He's forcibly suppressing the part of himself that wants to shake her off, shrug free of her melodramatic bullshit and tell her to get lost, when her body is roughly wrenched away from his and Carter-Jolinar steps in.

"If sexual favors will sway you," she says, her hard face right up in his face, "I will supply you with them, and you'll stand a far better chance of surviving the experience with me." Before he can answer, she steps back -- still straightarming Vala-Qetesh away -- to say to both of them, "But for the moment as you know we have a single, common objective. Lay all the groundwork you wish for future alliances, but only so long as it does not distract from the job at hand. Understood?"

The part of him that is Marell cringes away from the scolding even as he longs to strike out at her; the part of him that is Emissary Rulavo would chuckle indulgently if he had sole control of their body; the part of him that is Cameron Mitchell shakes off the part of himself that responds to an offer of sexual favors from someone he long wished for such an offer from, and gets with the program.

"Couldn't have said it better myself," he tells her while skewering Vala-Qetesh with his coldest, bluest stare. The faux-Goa'uld freebooter grins and gives a conspiratorial wink -- and he can barely stop the part of him she's conspiring with from smiling and winking back.

He strides to the anteroom -- just as Teal'c turns, and it's a Teal'c he's never seen before, and his stomach drops. "You," Teal'c says, in a low, threatening rumble. Then, his face twisting, his weapon coming to bear on Jackson: "_Ka'shak!_"

"Whoa whoa whoa!" Mitchell says, stepping between them -- a foolish, even suicidal move, but he's done it before Rulavo or Marell can stop them. "You are _not_ losing your shit, Teal'c, we can _not_ afford -- "

"He killed my _god_," Teal'c snarls.

_Oh, come on! "My name is Teal'c of Chulak, you killed my god, prepare to die"? Isn't this getting a little fucking old?_

Laying some Emissary smoothness over the top of a down-home twang, Mitchell says, "Free Jaffa, bubba. You're a Free Jaffa. They cast off their false gods."

"You and your 'mission reports,'" Teal'c growls at him, circling for a clear shot at Jackson, who's whimpering and hugging himself like a little kid and increasing Mitchell's feeling that he's landed in Hell's Romper Room. "Our exploits are like a tale to you, told around a campfire for your amusement and titillation. You know _nothing_. Stand aside."

Carter-Jolinar-Thera and Vala-Qetesh have come up to Mitchell's left and right, effectively encircling Jackson.

"Daniel Jackson is no longer the man who helped destroy Apophis," Qetesh says, "though I would be first to laud him for it if he were. What he has become we will have need of in the coming days. Enough of your petty Jaffa grudges!"

Teal'c hesitates, unimaginable battles waging in the darkness of his eyes, then shakes himself like a dog shaking off water and renews his sidestepping, serpentine stalk. He's the best marksman Mitchell has ever met, with any weapon. One blink, one wrong move from any of them and he'll find a hole to shoot through.

Closing her part of the human shield, Carter says, "The restoratory must have reconstituted a discrete personality from the overlay when Apophis brainwashed you, Teal'c," and her voice lowers and hardens and Jolinar says, "Its savagery and dedication will prove useful to you, but you must not let it become the dominant persona in your gestalt. It is deluded and will be unpredictable until it has sworn allegiance to a new god."

"I will serve no god but my lord Apophis!" Teal'c bellows. There's a note of anguish in it, but his stance remains just as fluid, just as dangerous.

Mitchell says, "Gods can't be killed. If Jackson whacked Apophis then Apophis was a fraud, right? _Think_, man. Come _on_."

"What is a god if not a being more powerful than we are ourselves? Rival gods prepare to come through the portal even now. Call them aliens, call them monsters, call them gods -- what do your words matter to me? I am sworn to the Goa'uld and I will die avenging the god I served. Stand aside that I may follow my lord Apophis into glory!"

_He's going to kill Jackson and then turn his weapon on himself,_ Rulavo and Marell and Mitchell realize together. _We're going to do the Ori's work for them. We're our own worst enemies, inside and out._

He's lost control of the situation. He never had control; he was never really in charge. They agreed to follow his orders in the field, that was all, and only because it was expedient to have one guy issuing the commands. But he never made the decisions. He's been part of a gestalt personality for two years, maybe for his whole career. Who is he kidding? What has _he_ ever really done but serve the god of duty?

"Gods or monsters," Qetesh's voice says from his right, as Vala's body insinuates itself into his peripheral vision and seduces Teal'c's attention, "only the strong survive. Apophis was your liege lord, but he was weak and unworthy of your service. _I_ am strong: _I_ have returned from the dead. I am Goa'uld, and I claim right of _kek'sha'mel_! Kneel to me, Teal'c of Chulak. I am Qetesh. _I_ am your god now."

Fear and uncertainty flicker in Teal'c's eyes, and a surge of hate as his gaze snaps to Jackson, and then ... comprehension. Relief. Dignity. Decision.

He goes to one knee and butts his P90 on the floor like a staff weapon. "My lord," his says, low and hoarse. "My lord. It is my honor to serve."

"Jesus jumpin' judy," Mitchell murmurs. "What the hell is _kek_ ... _sha_ ... "

"The assumption of ownership," Jackson says, and Mitchell wrenches around to find him recovered from his terrorized-child cringe and standing calmly with his hands clasped behind his back. He's looking down at Teal'c with a diffident beneficence, as though Teal'c's taken a knee for him. "Any System Lord could claim the service of unattached Jaffa -- ronin, if you will. I'm sure you're familiar with the culture and traditions of the samurai. It's not dissimilar."

"Always kinda preferred the ninja, myself," Mitchell says, out of his depth, treading water.

"Ah. Yes, you would." Jackson smiles, gentle and cold. "By forgoing the constraints of the samurai code of honor they proved quite deadly. They won by breaking the rules. I can see that appealing to you."

"I just thought the black outfits were cool," Mitchell says. His voice has gone down to a whisper. Qetesh has closed the distance between Vala's body and Teal'c's, and pulled a knife -- the one that Ba'al had? he's lost track, and he knows that's bad, he always kept subconscious tabs on all the weapons -- and slashed an X across the gold-embossed tattoo on Teal'c's forehead. She declares that they'll replace it with her glyph when they have the instruments and materials. For now, she says, Teal'c may rise.

"And you will do no further harm to the man called Daniel Jackson," she says -- and turns to them, and smiles. "Until I say so."

Jackson smiles back at her. It's his sweetest, friendliest, most Daniel smile, all cutie-pie dimples and crinkly nose and sparkling eyes, and it's the most chilling thing that Cameron Mitchell -- or Doctor Marell, or Emissary Rulavo -- has ever seen.

Dismissing Qetesh and her new henchman with the turn of his face, he brings that smile to bear on Mitchell, and there's no sparkle in the blue eyes now -- only the relentless, indomitable cold of a glacier. He cocks his head, just a little. Waiting. _Well?_

Mitchell and Marell, and even the Emissary, understand and obey. "We've got Ori knockin' at the door and an army to deploy and a job to do here, people," they say. "Time to get this show on the road."

They know whose henchman _they_ are now.

And that's OK, Mitchell thinks, in the space that's left to him in his crowded head. Deep down, he'd always kinda wanted Jackson to be the one calling the shots anyway.

Surface-to-ship transport is not possible, owing to the Ori system functioning more like ring transport than like Asgard beaming, but ship-to-ship transport is. The five of them capture the Ori ships one by one: they board the ship that landed to drop off the Prior they killed, reconfigure its control-chair interface to respond to them, leave the planet, and transport from ship to ship through the rest of their new fleet, killing each Prior, turning each crew, and reconfiguring each control chair. They can fly only five ships themselves, so fifteen ships must be keyed to the soldiers they deem most likely to remain loyal.

They agree that they can't go back to Stargate Command as themselves; technically they're not themselves, not precisely the selves they were at any rate, and if they're locked up for observation or interrogation the Ori will triumph because there's no one else who can be entrusted with the Sangreal -- there is no one else who can defeat this threat. They can't be bound by the rules of the infrastructure they worked under before; they can't reinsert themselves into the hierarchy that dispatched them. To save this galaxy from the Ori, they're going to have to take charge. They're going to have to do a lot of things that they wouldn't have had the stomach or the arrogance to do before. They agree that their transformation, however distressing it may seem to their root identities, is the best thing that could have happened under the circumstances. It gives them tools and knowledge they would not have otherwise had -- Doctor Marell's expertise in neurology, Jolinar's knowledge of Tok'ra technology, Thera's aptitude for engineering, the diversity of specialties among the _Stromos_ survivors -- and a willingness, most definitely lacking before, to do what's necessary.

So long as they remain dedicated to the common cause of routing the Ori -- so long as they work together -- there is nothing they can't do.

There is no longer anything they won't do.

&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;

Mitchell knows they've been lucky until now: either they found what they were looking for near the gate on the planet they visited to search for it, or they could do a remote aerial survey of the whole planet looking for indicators like energy output and likely hiding places like centers of trade and development on otherwise sparsely inhabited continents. They couldn't be a hundred per cent certain that Merlin's weapon wasn't on Castiana, Sahal or Vagonbrei without searching every hollow and crevice, pulling out every drawer, looking under every pillow and digging under the entire surface of each planet. But they could do a thorough check of all the major indicators, and they did.

Here, not so much. Here it's a painstaking, footsore search, room by room and building by building. As their search radius widens, they find air scooters that make it faster to get out to the unsearched perimeter and back each day. But it's still a big city, on a landmass of unknown size, on what they can assume from the Terran gravity and atmosphere is a pretty big planet.

Carter jury-rigs the semblance of a UAV from an air scooter, a video camera, a couple of radios and some chewing gum. OK, not so much the chewing gum, although Vala had some Chiclets and she offered when there was a problem mounting the bedsheet-and-picture-frame wings on the thing. They get it airborne, and before it wipes out it sweeps around high enough and far enough to tell them that there's nothing but grassy countryside within a couple of hundred klicks. Jackson's kinda pissed about the camera. They manage to salvage most of the onboard radio.

Jackson determines early on that it's not a city of the Ancients, only modeled on the architecture of one. That means it's not the really big pile of needles they expected -- and they can operate the technology they run across. It doesn't mean the search goes any faster. They still have to scan every section of every structure.

Carter can charge her instruments and the radios from common power sources around the city. They can eat the food and drink the water. It's summer, so the days are long and the nights aren't cold. They haul beds from nearby residences into their increasingly fortified base camp in what judging from the mirrored walls might have been some kind of dance studio or rehearsal hall. They make themselves comfortable. They don't talk about how long they might be stuck here.

No one has responded to their repeating message requesting assistance. They haven't found a gate or a spaceport or anything resembling the transport device that brought them here. They're aware that this could be a very, very big dead end. There's no way to call home and no way to get offworld.

They don't find any books or written records, or so much as a chicken scratch of inscription on any walls. They don't find anything that resembles a computer interface, forget electronic entertainment. Every indication is that there were people living here until very recently -- the perishables haven't perished, the batteries haven't crapped out, the plumbing still works, fresh clothes and bedding fill every dwelling -- but there's nobody, _nobody_ home. If there was a mass exodus, it was extraordinarily low-impact. If something killed them, it didn't leave any bodies, and it took all the birds and insects and small animals, too. The only sounds they don't make themselves come from the breeze ruffling the leaves of ornamental trees.

It would be creepy if it weren't so peaceful. It would be peaceful if it weren't so lonely. The loneliness wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the boredom. All there is to do is search.

And everything is green. The whole damn place is green, from the not-stone the buildings are made out of to the dyes in the clothes and the bark on the trunks of the green-leafed trees. Humming "Greensleeves" or "It Isn't Easy Being Green" or any song by the group Green Day is declared a capital offense. They eat green food. They sleep in green darkness.

"If my pee turns green ... " Mitchell starts one day, and _saying_ the word 'green' is declared a capital offense.

"Look on the bright side," Vala says. "If the weapon's as red as the Sangreal, it should stand out like a sore thumb."

"The Sangreal was supposed to _be_ the weapon," Adria says. She's still not Over It, and screwing Ba'al hasn't done much to improve her petulant personality. In Mitchell's opinion it's because Jackson's the one she really wants, and you can blame her for spearheading a galactic invasion and you can blame her for thousands of horrific deaths, but you sure as hell can't blame her for that.

He knows that the interpersonal stuff is going to become a problem.

He knows that Teal'c's running out of tretonin and Jackson's running out of antihistamines. He also knows that Carter's birth-control implant is only good for three months, and that's something he's been trying real, real hard to pretend he doesn't know. He doesn't know what he doesn't know about Vala and he's pretty sure he doesn't want to know. He wonders what the Goa'uld and the Orici have been using for prophylactics and then goes down to the nearest ornamental fountain to wash his brain out with camp soap.

He wonders why the Ori armies haven't come looking for their leader.

He wonders what their _second_ month will be like.

&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;

At the end of the first long day of hiking to the abandoned city and establishing defensible shelter and starting to search, Adria plunks herself down in the middle of their base-camp-in-a-box and declares that there's obviously nothing here, this is a waste of time, and she's not going to spend another day traipsing around this useless city.

"Like mother, like daughter," Ba'al murmurs, from his arms-crossed stance against a marbled green pillar.

"_I_ traipsed," Vala calls from inside the pup tent where she's unpacking her mostly useless gear. "I traipsed quite a bit more than you did, as it happens."

"And speaking of which," says Mitchell, hanging camp utensils on a cord across the doorway as a homemade perimeter alert, "how 'bout a little pitching-in with the pitching-camp here?"

"Such menial labor is beneath me," Ba'al replies, and as Mitchell says "So's the floor, big guy, and you're gonna be sleepin' on it tonight" Carter comes in brandishing one of her handhelds and says, "I know where we are."

"Great!" says Mitchell. "Where's the nearest bus stop?"

"Two star systems over, take a left at the nebula, across from the Wal-Mart," she tells him sourly.

"Oh, man, they're opening those damn things everywhere!" he says, and Vala says, "Talk about your Evil Empires," and Daniel says, "Well _I'm_ writing my congressman," and Teal'c says, perfectly deadpan, "I stood on the picket line for many days."

Breaking into a half grin, Carter says, "According to my calculations based on the constellations in the night sky, we're partway around the spiral arm, about two hundred and seventeen light-years from where we were. But we're still in the Milky Way."

"So, distress beacon?" Daniel says.

"If anyone happens to swing by close enough to pick up the signal," Carter says, already prying the back off her radio to rig something, "but yes, it's worth a try."

"Would anyone care to wager on whether Princess Orici can send a signal with that pretty pendant?" Ba'al asks, silky-smooth.

Everyone turns to her. She stares up defiantly, and after a moment Vala says softly, "Surely you wouldn't mind ringing for a taxi, dear."

"My abilities don't work here any more than they did in Morgan's cave," she says, with a sharp glance at Daniel, who outted that piece of information to the rest of them while they hiked here.

"But your pendant works," Daniel says, laying down the pile of bedding he hadn't admitted to scrounging from nearby homes for her to sleep on.

Adria rises and backs away from the semicircle they've formed. "Purely for personal defense," she says, "as you pointed out yourself."

"But there is a transmitter," Carter says. "You generated the illusion of the old librarian. Generating a communication signal's a lot simpler."

"It requires too much power," Adria says.

There's a just-audible click as Mitchell slips the safety off his weapon. "And you're saving the power for ... ?"

"Go ahead and shoot me, Colonel Mitchell," she says. "I can maintain my shield until you run out of ammunition."

"Or maybe I've got enough ammo to run the battery down so we can take it away from you," he says.

"Cam," Carter warns softly. "I won't be able to recharge it."

"Cross that bridge," Mitchell sings softly, and brings his P-90 to bear.

"All right!" Adria bursts out, raising her hands. "Don't shoot. The truth is that I'm completely powerless here. However that transporter worked, it drained the pendant completely. I'm no better off than any of you. Are you happy now?"

Mitchell slings his P-90, says casually, "No, not really," draws and aims his sidearm, waits for the flicker of frightened comprehension to reach her eyes, and fires.

There's a sharp report and a spongy _thwack_. Adria cries out, clutching at her side, then pulls her hands away to stare at their bloodless palms and down at the black welt the bullet scored in the metallic bustier along her waist.

"But now I am," Mitchell says. He holds the weapon steady on her for a couple of seconds, 'til he's made his point. Then he holsters it.

Regarding the hole in the apparently-not-so-marbly-as-it-looked wall behind Adria, Teal'c says, "May I remind you, Colonel Mitchell, that ordinarily bullets bounce."

"Reminder noted," Mitchell says. "Let's finish setting up here and catch some zees. I'll take first watch. Whole lotta _traipsin'_ to do tomorrow."

Daniel moves toward Adria, and her face softens and opens into the beginnings of surprised relief at the solicitous advance. He brushes past her without blinking, and bends to examine the substance of the wall, fascinated with the hole the bullet made -- as if it had sunk into wet clay instead of chipping into what they thought was granitic stone.

&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;

On their eleventh attempt, scorched and hungry and tired and trying not to think about the hundreds of combinations and permutations Carter calculated they might have to try, they shuffle through the barrier in a clump of seven, file across the bridge, fit themselves gingerly around the pedestal on the small platform, and on Mitchell's count of three all reach for the holographic Sangreal at once.

"All substance no flash," Carter breathes in surprise, as her fingertips touch faceted glass.

"I'll be damned," Mitchell says, as the bottomless cavern shimmers away and is replaced by a vista of open fields, fringed by forest way off to the -- he squints deeply to gauge the angle of the sun -- south, the pale green towers and spires of a city to the north. The scent of grassy earth is overpowering after the dank ozoney caves. Daniel sneezes. No ones says 'gesundheit.'

"Is this where we've been all along?" Vala asks. "Was the dragon cavern an illusion?"

"That was a transportation effect," Ba'al says. He turns his most rakish grin on Adria. "That ... tingly sensation in the bone marrow."

Through his handkerchief, Daniel says, "Yes, I felt it too."

"A transport device," Adria says, with an undertone of profound disappointment. As though she'd _wanted_ the Sangreal to be a weapon that could destroy the entire race of which she's the half-human avatar. "Just a transport device, like any other."

"Like the key to the doorway on P7Z-419, only without the doorway," Carter says, and Mitchell, who's never outgrown the habit of redundantly citing mission-report details, says, "The one that transported Colonel O'Neill and Colonel Maybourne to the dead colony on that planet's moon."

"A rather famously one-way trip, if I recall correctly," Ba'al says sourly, surveying the environs.

"It's not exactly like rings or gates or even Asgard beaming technology," Daniel says, "so let's not assume the worst."

"The device that transports one back may be located elsewhere simply to facilitate traffic," Teal'c says. "We may well find it along the way as we search for the weapon."

"What _traffic_?" Vala says. There's not a soul in sight, nor any sign of husbandry or agriculture, nor any hint of movement off toward the city.

"That looks like a city of the Ancients," Daniel says.

"A very abandoned city of the Ancients," Ba'al says.

"There'll be Ancient technology everywhere," Carter says. "If the weapon's even there, it'll be a needle in a ... "

"Really big stack of needles," Daniel supplies.

"Guess we better get started then," Mitchell says, and sets off for the city, thinking that if he gets nothing else from this mission, at least he finally understands why General O'Neill can never resist a _Wizard of Oz_ crack. If that isn't the Emerald City over there, he doesn't know what is. And one way or another, they're always off to see the wizard.

When Vala starts humming the tune, nobody gripes at her to knock it off. Probably because it gets "Puff the Magic Dragon" to stop running through their heads.

&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;

The fire of the dragon's breath washes over the rocks just as the seven of them shrink into crevices and behind stalagmites. Sam can feel her eyelashes singe. The heat is three times as bad as the heat from the flames in the last cave, and the sulfurous reek is choking. She fires three bursts into it, then three more, half-deafened by syncopated bursts from Vala and Teal'c. She trusts their marksmanship; the rounds are passing right through. "Hold your fire!" she shouts. Waste of ammo.

Cameron's echoey-confined voice comes from the next crevice over, muffled by what feels like cotton in her ears: "Toldja holograms could be dangerous."

"Gesundheit!" Ba'al shouts, a resonant absurdity amplified to majesty by the acoustics of the cave.

At first Sam thinks he's making a ridiculous joke, and then she thinks, _The code word_, mildly surprised that he wasn't lying about having one.

The dragon shrieks, tosses its head, and opens its mouth wide.

"_GESUNDHEIT!_" Ba'al commands again, with full Goa'uld distortion. In her peripheral vision Sam catches the eerie glow of his eyes reflecting off the rocks.

The dragon roars flame at them a second time, heating the stone around them, turning their crevices into sweltering, stinking saunas, outdoing the Goa'uld eye-glow by a factor of a thousand.

"'Gesundheit'?" Cameron shouts. "_Gesundheit_ was the code word?"

"Perhaps if I offered it a tissue?" Vala calls over the sigh of Teal'c's zat activating. "Or a breath mint, I'm quite sure I packed some Tic-Tacs in my -- "

The sharp whine of the zat is followed by a shriek of blue energy. It webs the dragon and freezes in outline, like a wireframe shapshot of a previous state, as the wings beat through it. Then it dissipates, to no effect.

"Did you get the Sangreal?" Sam calls toward the crevice Daniel squeezed into. Adria's body blocked her view of the pedestal across the bridge, no doubt deliberately.

"My hand passed right through it."

"A hologram too?"

"What else could it be?"

Vala calls, "Why is this wretched lizard defending it if you couldn't even pick it up? --Move that hand any lower, Gumball, and I shall remove it from your wrist."

The dragon continues to hover but makes no aggressive movements until Ba'al feints out from his cover. Then it belches another fireball, and Ba'al jerks out of sight an eyeblink before he's incinerated.

"Hold your position!" Cameron bites out, through the fire-and-brimstone stench.

"I was pushed!" Ba'al roars, and after the dragon roars back, Sam can just hear Vala saying, " ... be a baby. I pulled you back, didn't I? We had to see what it would do."

"Guys, we need a plan here," Sam calls.

"I shouldn't have tried to pick it up," Daniel calls. "All that did was trip the alarm. If I could get a closer look at the blue sigil under the symbols on the pillar behind it -- "

"Yes," Adria calls, "the image on the pedestal is obviously a decoy. We must try again."

"What's with this 'we,' Kimosabe?" Cameron says. Sam hears him clearing his weapon. "_We_ distract Puff the Magic Hologram while _Jackson_ takes another shot at the Sangreal."

"Dragons live forever, but not so little boys," Daniel mutters.

"Buck up, Jackie Paper," Cameron says. "Did you want to live forever?"

The dragon is still holding station, bony membranous wings laboring in a pointless display that wouldn't even begin to keep it aloft if it were real. The situation is beginning to feel like a video game on Pause. This whole thing has been a game, however deadly. Aren't there games where you're _supposed_ to backtrack? Games that hide crucial clues in the dead ends, so that if you don't go wrong sometimes you can never go right?

"It would be foolish to risk Daniel Jackson in that manner," Teal'c says. He doesn't have to call out; his resonant speaking voice carries, even at a warning growl. So does the sound of his movement as he comes out from cover and stands in the center of the stone wall that lowered over the passageway behind them.

"Dammit, get back to cover!" Sam shouts, as the dragon rears back to launch another fireball.

Teal'c stands directly in its path, inviting the fire.

"_Teal'c!_" Daniel shouts. It takes both Sam and Cameron to keep Daniel from throwing himself at Teal'c to push him out of the fireball's path.

At the last possible moment, Teal'c ducks to cover behind a stalagmite. A trickle of lava runs down to the edge of the abyss and hisses over. When the smoke clears, they can see that the wall blocking their exit has melted away.

"I now suggest a tactical withdrawal," Teal'c says.

Adria cries out "But we might not get another chance!" and Vala calls "You're the one who kept carrying on about turning back!" and Adria calls "That was before we _found_ it, Mother -- "

Cameron's order cuts her off: "On my signal, fall back!" He ducks out and in. As the billow of flame rolls over his position, he shouts, "Now!"

Ba'al, then Vala, then Adria roll around the rock and down the passage, then Daniel and Teal'c. Sam's closer to the exit, so Cameron brings up the rear. He comes back into the relative safety of the cave with the back of his uniform smoking from neck to heels. They can't tell whether the dragon's next fireball got him, or the barrier of flame rising up behind him. Maybe they amount to the same thing. Vala beats sparks and cinders out of his jacket and pants until she thumps too hard and he coughs and swats her away.

"Now what?" Ba'al says, standing with arms folded, head and hip cocked. He's as damnably handsome as Adria, who's standing beside him again, is exquisitely beautiful. The observation passes in a fraction of a second, but Sam's cheeks burn with shame. It would be execrable at any time -- they're both mass-murderers, corrupt powermongers, Ba'al tortured the colonel to death countless times with the very knife handed over in the glade, she saw the darkness pass across Daniel's eyes at the sight of it and knew, even though the colonel had never told her -- but it's beyond inappropriate now.

_Not so much with the truth of spirit here_, she thinks.

Daniel hasn't taken his eyes from the wall of fire, even as Teal'c handed him the pack he'd retrieved for him. "Now we try again," he says.

"You think it's a reset?" Cameron asks as Vala says brightly, "Oh goody, we get a do-over!"

"I don't know," Daniel says. "If that was another test, we might get a different scenario on the next attempt. We don't have the five virtues for guidelines anymore, and because we passed all the other tests we don't know what the consequences are for failure."

"Not death, at least, since we're all still here and the roof hasn't _entirely_ fallen in," Vala says, brushing dust and chunks of stone from the pack she's just lifted onto Mitchell's shoulders.

"Strategic retreat may not constitute failure," Teal'c says. He looks uncharacteristically weary, short-tempered, and Sam wonders if he got the same video-game feeling she did, and if this reminds him of his hundreds of attempts to beat the virtual foothold simulation. "As Daniel Jackson implies, we can deduce revised parameters only by making another attempt and comparing the results." He moves into the center of the cave. "I will go next."

Cameron has made the same assessment of Teal'c that Sam has. He moves to the center to meet him, and claps a warm hand on the muscled shoulder. "We'll all go. Together."

"We'll do no such thing," Adria says, just stopping herself from glancing at the flames but not in time to keep Sam from seeing the flicker of terror and thinking, _Interesting_.

"I wasn't talking to you," Cam says, still looking at Teal'c.

"It's a wide mouth into a comparatively narrow tunnel," Daniel says. "It's wide enough for four to pass through abreast. Maybe that means it's supposed to be a group. Teamwork wasn't one of the virtues listed on the parchment, but then again ... " He glances over his shoulder. " ... that parchment was a fabrication, wasn't it?"

"It was identical to the original, a perfect copy," Adria snaps; he's insulted her handiwork.

"We'll squeeze five through," Cameron says, ignoring Adria. "Maybe this part is the pop quiz. No crib sheet. No fakebook. Just the virtues we came in with. The five of us." He steps back from Teal'c to take in the whole team with his body language. He's become a better leader, a better _team_ leader, over the past few months. Better than she can be, with this particular team, and it's _because_ he was the FNG, it's _because_ he came from outside. Her SG-1 was a trio of equals; she didn't give orders, she gave voice to consensus. Cam's flaw was flying off solo, trying to do it all himself, and he's gotten over that. He's learned how to command a ground unit, _this_ unit -- and part of her despises herself for deferring to it.

"Four," she says. Cameron glances sharply at her, half _You got a problem, airman?_ and half _What gives, you OK?_, and she barely keeps her hackles down. "Little short on truth-of-spirit here -- and one of us has to watch them."

"Oh, please," Vala says, laughing, "if you think you've cornered the low-truth-of-spirit market, I'm afraid you'll just have to get in line." She blinks, tries to recover: "I mean, not behind _me_, certainly, but Teal'c, for example -- "

"I got through," Daniel says, cutting Vala off, pulling his gaze from the flames for the first time to look at Sam. He smiles, just a little, and it sends a chill up her spine even in the furnace heat of the barrier. "If I can, you can."

"We all go," Cameron says. Definitive, confident. "We're a team. That's how we save the galaxy. We walk through the fire together."

"What about us?" Adria says, and there's enough plaintive petulance in it to turn Sam's stomach. The two foremost rivals for galactic domination, turned into bickering tagalongs. It would be astonishingly pathetic if they weren't both so deadly.

"Flames wink out like before, you follow us into whatever's on the other side," Cameron says.

"And if they don't?" Ba'al asks.

Cameron just smiles, and turns his back, to face the barrier.

The four of them come up beside him. He's right: the opening's wide enough, and it has to be the whole team.

"Faith," Daniel says. "That's still the key."

Sam knows what he means, and what Cameron meant before about crib sheets. It can't be faith derived empirically from the fact that they saw Daniel survive this an hour ago. It can't be faith they pretend to have because the list of virtues said they had to have it. It has to be genuine. It has to be faith in each other.

"I have every faith that we can do this," Cameron says.

"As do I," Teal'c says.

"Yes yes, me three," Vala says. "Can't we just get on with it?" She's trembling, and Sam feels Daniel, on the other side of her, press her tighter between them. Sam presses back to lend support.

_You won't burn to death,_ she thinks. _Not this time. We won't let you._

"Sam?" Cameron says. "How 'bout you?"

Sam says, with all the truth in her heart, "I believe that as long as it's the five of us together, there's nothing in the universe we aren't capable of."

"That's the spirit," Cameron says, with a little smile, and they step forward as one, shoulder to shoulder, into the flames.

^^^^^^^^^^


End file.
